Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover.

I love adult thrillers and murder mysteries and everything like that.

I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

When I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher - "hoping that I like the book as much as he does" - I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang.

The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty?

I am more of a suspense writer. A mystery writer solves mysteries. I am a 'high suspense' writer.

I don't very often read novels.

I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels.

The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.

I do try not to spend much time reading in the suspense genre.

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.

Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.

I'm not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.

With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.

A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

I will literally read anything, regardless of genre, fiction or non-fiction, as long as it's well written.

This next to never happens, but if I had time to sit on a beach and read, I wouldn't read a cozy. But I've read cozies. That's how I got interested in crime fiction: because my mother was a soft-boiled reader.

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

I read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.