Michael Robotham Quotes

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

When I create a story, I can make it however funny, sad, or happy I want it to be. And when I read, I feel like I'm in the story, and I get to experience it. It feels like I'm watching someone else do something, but I'm doing the thing that the character is doing as well.

As far as what readers can expect with 'Maybe Someday,' I'm not the type of writer who writes to educate or inform my readers. I simply write to entertain them.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author's world.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.

I wasn't interested in novelty. I was looking for good drama.

Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.

Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I've witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.

When I set out to write 'Sanctus,' all I wanted to do was craft a piece of high quality entertainment.

People want good stories.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

I see my responsibility as to give people something they want to keep turning the pages of and giving people something to chew on, looking at some aspect of human nature that hadn't occurred to them recently.