Ruth Rendell Quotes

I try to end every chapter with an air of suspense. I try to leave the reader wanting to turn the page.

Will the reader turn the page?

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.

There is hardly a person alive who does not want to know 'what happened next,' in any context.

I would imagine that anyone picking up a book written by me would expect a fast-paced story that requires minimal effort to turn the pages. The reader would also be looking for some out-of-the-ordinary revelations along the way. At the end of the day, I'm a writer who simply loves revealing stuff that is out-of-the-ordinary.

I'm one of those crazy people, if I'm watching the trailer for a movie and I'm really excited by it, I'll turn it off because I don't want to know anything. I want to be surprised because I love that more than knowing anything.

Ultimately, a great thriller is a roller coaster ride. I like to think that's a promise I have never failed to keep, and one that I'd say has served my books well.

It's what you don't see that keeps you on the edge of your seat in any kind of film - leave it to the imagination of the viewer.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars.

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

One feels the excitement of hearing an untold story.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.

I like thrillers a lot. There's a lot of discipline connected to them. You can't be as freewheeling as you are with character pieces.

What keeps readers turning pages is suspense, which you can create using a variety of techniques, including tension, pacing and foreshadowing.

In 'Lost,' they really believed in the mystery box and not looking too much inside the mystery box. It was some kind of idea generator that you didn't need to dissect and open up. And that's absolutely fascinating and an engaging way to tell a story.

Suspense is a real tough beast in terms of the filmmaking.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement.