Suspenseful Plots Quotes

Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people - about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.

Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can't afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters.

I'm a fan of short horror fiction... in fact, the most memorable horror I've read is of the short variety... but I have a hard time pulling it off myself.

Michael Harvey should be read by all.

When I started writing, I was reading people such as Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, who did 'Jurassic Park,' which is possibly the most action-filled book you'll read, apart from mine, and I said to myself, 'Why aren't these guys doing big-scale action like you would see in a movie?'

I think I was always meant to write dark stories.

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Lee Child and George R. R. Martin write wildly different books. Their writing, plotting and styles have little or nothing in common. But they all write books and characters that readers find appealing.

People have told me that the dialogue in '100 Bullets' is very realistic. I don't agree.

In elementary school, I loved the 'Bailey School Kids' series. It was about a group of classmates who would speculate whether adults in their lives were supernatural beings. I read literally every single book in the series.

I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.

I was heavily into John D. MacDonald.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.

People like the Bosch books because they like Harry Bosch, not because the plots are fantastic.

I'm going to name a name: Janet Evanovich. She writes the same book over and over, and I read every single one of them and eagerly anticipate them.

I find that a lot of directors are attracted to the dark side.

I prefer thrillers but when it's thriller/horror, I like it. The gore is not very important to me, I prefer suspense. But I like dark films.

I'm always looking for films, but the horror scripts that I get tend to be very repetitive and often not that interesting.

I feel most akin as an artist, in my life and my career, to Agatha Christie.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one. In fact I believe that if I weren't to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn't be able to write it at all.

Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.

Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context.

I like horror films and romance films. Films where you're going in being like, 'I'm coming here to be scared or to fall in love.' You have a goal.