Avi Quotes

I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

The important thing about any book is that you have to have a good story and that it has to be exciting. Then it's nice to add other levels underneath that people can pick up on.

'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.

I'm not the next J. K. Rowling. We've got one already. It's flattering to be compared to her. I like her books and loved the first three particularly, but apart from the fact that they've got young boys as heroes, they're very different.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

My number one goal as a thriller writer is to entertain you. But I've got a chance to not only entertain people, but have them close my book and be smarter having read it.

It's always been the genres that fascinated me. I think great action movies and great thrillers are transformative.

Every great story leaves you questioning. If all of the questions are answered, and everything is resolved, it's boring. There's nothing to talk about afterwards.

I remember when I was watching 'Lost,' which I loved. I didn't know what was going on, but I still loved it.

If you can't figure out how to make the beginning of your book compelling, you're probably not writing a compelling book.

A thriller needs to hold the interest of the reader from the very beginning. It needs to engage with them, hold them in rapt attention, and prevent them from putting down the book.

Anytime I feel like I am beginning to explain the plot or characters too much my stomach churns. I like stories that let the characters speak for themselves and don't give you all the information.

I want to do a travel book.

For me, the favourite chapters have always been the last chapters in the books. I knew exactly how each book would end - and how the first chapter of the following book would begin. I knew I wanted to leave the readers with answers - and a bunch of new questions!

I'm 100 percent original, and that's what got me here. My rap music is more understandable, slower. It tells a story. You can write a book on each of my thoughts.

I like the brighter, shinier, happier comic-book material on a personal level, but I also think the best stories are told where you just don't know from page to page or moment to moment when the sucker-punches are coming.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

One of the greatest sins in any story is false suspense. The kind of 'suspense' that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. And it's an easy trap to fall into, so watch carefully for it. If your story hinges on the question, 'Will Superman be pushed so far in his battle against Lex Luthor that he'll have to kill him?', or if your big cliffhanger moment is, 'Wow, is Spider-Man really dead this time?', then I understand Food Lion is hiring.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.

I try to weave a secret into each plot. It's the thread that holds the rest of the story fabric together. In fact, it's the reason for the story. I hint at the secret early on. Immediately I want the reader to get the feeling that something here isn't quite right. It helps maintain the suspense if a puzzling element is introduced in the first few pages of the book, but the answer isn't revealed until the final ones. Hopefully, readers want to know what the heck is really going on, and it's the desire to find out that keeps them turning pages.

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.