Umberto Eco Quotes

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

I'm not a good crime writer. I'm not good with plots... so I have to do something else.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting.

I don't think the Barbara Vines are mysteries in any sense. The Barbara Vine is much more slowly paced. It is a much more in-depth, searching sort of book; it doesn't necessarily have a murder in it.

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.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.

I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

I like movies that pop, that have a little bit of candy on, that freedom to have a little bit of extra fun, but are rooted in real behaviour. Rooted in cause and effect, never violating reality.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

Tension is the cornerstone of any good story.