Mark Billingham Quotes

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool.

Every character a writer creates has some of themselves in it somewhere.

People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist.

I think striking the right tone for your story is, if you like, the alchemical work of writing.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.