Lee Child Quotes

You just write about things that happen.

My job is to help my father tell stories.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.

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 like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

I'm actually quite critical of the storytelling theme. I think all the storytellers are not storytellers.

What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we're telling them about.

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

I like the compressed nature of the story telling.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

There's only so many ways to tell a story before the story gets boring.

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

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.

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.