Erin Morgenstern Quotes

I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books.

'Double Indemnity' is one of my all time favorites. That's my favorite.

A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.

Believe it or not, but 'White Heat' and 'Little Caesar' keep dancing around in my brainpan while I'm writing 'Moonshine.'

I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old.

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

I particular enjoy the crime writer, Walter Ellis Mosley. He does a series of Chandler-esque detective stories.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

With 'The Big Lebowski,' we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it's about L.A.

Southerners have this love of embellishment. Even when you read a police report, there's some backstory.

I don't read that many books - I tend to read scripts for projects.

I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.

I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.

Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, 'Did it happen or didn't it happen?' It's one of form.

A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.

I get attracted to projects because of the script or the idea and the basic character.

Bausch is a wonderful storyteller. He's a mature writer who has a lot of confidence in the quality of character. He doesn't need to hook you with a sneaky plot and zany characters.

First, hugely popular and talented romance/dark fantasy author Meljean Brook gives a really deep, wonderful story. She's clearly spent so much time thinking about the world of Sonja and her story in particular, it could easily have been a novel of its own.

It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.

Mike and I figured out a lot about the world, characters and story in the initial two weeks between creating 'Avatar' and pitching it to Nickelodeon.