Henning Mankell Quotes

In all my movies, be it 'Page 3', 'Chandni Bar' or 'Corporate,' I have tried to depict honesty and reality.

Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

For me, crime fiction was an opportunity to sneak up on readers with social issues, something they won't go out of their way to seek.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

I'm not at all upset to be considered a crime novelist. But for me, it's never really about the crime or the violence. I'm much more interested in exploring issues.

All my books are adventures, but they also have a social viewpoint.

Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course.

I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

For me, I really like the human drama embedded in a crime story, and I like the way European films do that.

Sci-fi works for me as a way of getting across a social conceit couched as entertainment. Social realist movies lost their way because they are just not that entertaining.

All the science fiction I loved as a kid was holding up a mirror to society and warning us about the need for course correction.

Uncle Dave Macon was a great balladeer and banjo player from the early part of the 19th century... He would take a social problem or something that he was looking at and make up a clever little song about it, you know, in a language everyone understood, a man of the people.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in.

I watched 'The Wire' religiously.

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

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.

I didn't create thug life, I diagnosed it

Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.

People say you can't make movies about your politics or the environment. And, generally speaking, I completely divide those sides of my brain.

Nothing so upholds the laws as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.

In movies that tackle these political issues, there are far more interesting themes to be explored than partisan politics, which is what we get on cable news every second of every day.