Chris Pavone Quotes

How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it's your book that's coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.

Write the best book you can, the one that demands to be written, no matter what genre it is. Even a trend the trades tell you has gone stale can be revitalized by a superb piece of writing. It'll never be revitalized by someone jumping on a trend bandwagon.

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

You have to go where the good writing is.

Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that's what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample.

Mainly I love working on good writing.

The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.

I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.

'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.

When I started to be a writer, I was not going to run the risk of boring you.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.

It's all in the writing. The writing has got to be there. Whether that's dialogue or character, or whatever, it doesn't matter. As long as they've done something special, than you can do something special.

There are good writers and bad writers. It's hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out there.

The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.

I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

'Luther' is raw and brutal like 'Game Of Thrones,' but it's coincidence. If I'm drawn to anything, it would be the writing. Choosing a project is an organic process where I'm taken in by the character and storyline, not the genre, whether fantasy or gritty and raw.

When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.

When you have good writing, the rhythm of the scene is very apparent. What the scene demands is very clear.

My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.