Lee Child Quotes on Writing

12 quotes

  1. I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me, and my website has built up a community of readers, which is a lot of fun.

  2. I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

  3. I love touring. The rest of the year is very solitary, so it's great to get out with real live humans. I love to talk about books - mine or anybody else's. Can't think of anything odd that happened this time around. I met a few people I'd emailed with extensively - strange to put faces to names.

  4. I think my books come out very visual, which is an obvious consequence.

  5. I wanted a happy-go-lucky guy. He has quirks and problems, but the thing is, he doesn't know he's got them. Hence, no tedious self-pity. He's smart and strong, an introvert, but any anguish he suffers is caused by others.

  6. I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

  7. I was determined to avoid the 'hero as self-aware damaged person' paradigm. I'm afraid as a reader I got sick of all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre.

  8. I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.'

  9. Obviously I watched the movies and the TV shows, but I guess I wasn't aware how deeply the influence was affecting me.

  10. So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

  11. Specifically, I was determined to avoid the hero-as-self-aware-damaged-person paradigm. I'm afraid as a reader I got sick of all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre.

  12. Well, writers become writers because they love words and language, and attempting a non-native style is all part of the fun.

All Lee Child quotes