Thriller Writing Quotes

The things I discovered when writing 'Line of Duty' were the tools you have available to write a thriller.

I don't like writing straight-up thrillers. I like writing about families hurled into crisis and danger - soccer moms and regular dads and husbands who might have to rescue their daughters or who are, say, hedge fund managers and have one foot on the sidelines watching their kids and the other in nefarious cover-ups and conspiracies.

Women who write thrillers are called 'dark.' Male writers are called 'powerful.'

I love writing thrillers.

I always wanted to write psychological thrillers.

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

A stunner…reminds me of Tom Clancy at his finest.

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

When you write a high-tech thriller, and then people in the defense establishment start calling you - people I can't name - you feel you've hit a nerve.

I often put any project I write in a different decade just to roll the thought around in my head. There's a thriller I've written that I think would be nice to set in the '70s or '80s, just to take cell phones away from the movie. There's nothing like the piercing ring of an old-school telephone to really scare an audience.

Throat clutching from the outset! The Never List stands as a sterling example of psychological thriller writing at its best. Cancel appointments and give up on sleep. It's that kind of book.

For me, a big part of writing psychological thrillers is choosing crimes committed for motives which would only apply to a particular person in a particular situation; a unique, one-off motive that is born out of someone's particular range of psychological afflictions.

My number one goal as a thriller writer is to entertain you. But I've got a chance to not only entertain people, but have them close my book and be smarter having read it.

There are two worldviews in thriller writing: the paranoid view, like Chuck Logan's, that everything is inside a large clockwork. I like those books; they're intricate and thought out, but my view is that everything is chaotic and stupid. Chaos reigns, and civilized people do what they can to hold it back.

The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

The intricacy of plotting a thriller is akin to writing formal poetry.

If you're going to write thrillers, you have to make a decision if you are going to be realistic or go off and over.

The danger of writing a so-called thriller is that in your last 100 pages, all of these really interesting characters you've created are just running away from something or toward something, but they're no longer capable of innovation or discovery.

Instead of writing thrillers to pay for my train bills, I was actually now going to medical school in order to have something to write about.

One of my books, 'Rain Falling on My Face,' earned me the 39th Edogawa Ranpo prize. It's a very prestigious literary prize in Japan, mostly for mysteries and thrillers.

If you are writing a thriller with violence in it, the ending must be violent. You are delivering a promise to your reader.

With thrillers, I tend to concentrate on the research and pace more than the characters.

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.