The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.
God made man because he loved to listen to stories.
Myths are the prototype for all stories. When we write a story on our own it can't help but link up with all sorts of myths. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is.
One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from.
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.
The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found.
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.
Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'
I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.
There are certainly stories that I used to tell myself as a kid that did influence 'The Cabinet of Wonders.' There's a scene in the novel where there's a flood that bursts through the castle, and one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid at school was imagine what school would be like if there was a sudden flood.
The first time someone stood up in front of the fire and told the story while illustrating it with shadows on the walls of the quarry, that was the birth of theater.
The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.
Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear.
Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.
