Daniel Woodrell Quotes

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

I'm proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.

The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature.

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.

If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is...' then name a really brilliant crime writer.

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

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

That's why I love crime novels so much: When I write a crime novel, the conflict is built in.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?

I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that genre, because there's a language there and you can twist it and turn it on its head or play to it or go sideways at any time.

I'm from Texas, and I would love to do an old-fashioned gun-slinging Western.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff.

I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.

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

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.

I think an old-school Western would kind of be really up my alley and would be so fun, I'm so comfortable in that genre and around horses.

I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn't have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn't listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model airplanes.

When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel.

I do read P.D. James because she pays much more attention to character, to a particular atmosphere or setting. But most mystery writers, I think, are controlled by the plot.

Westerns are fun. I wish more of them would be made. When you're out there on a set, carrying a gun, riding a horse, you kind of get lost in that make believe world.