Linwood Barclay Quotes

#1. Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

Linwood Barclay

#2. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

Linwood Barclay

#3. Facebook, from what I can tell, is the virtual equivalent of dropping into the homes of several million people, all of whom say at the same time: 'Hey! Let's set up the slide projector!'

Linwood Barclay

#4. Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.

Linwood Barclay

#5. Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It's a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure.

Linwood Barclay

#6. Generally speaking, rural drivers are a much better behaved species than city drivers. I'm not sure whether they're intrinsically this way, or there are just fewer opportunities for them to do behave badly. You can't go around running red lights if there aren't any red lights to run.

Linwood Barclay

#7. You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don't know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. 'Trust Your Eyes' is the best book I've written, and I don't know if I can do any better.

Linwood Barclay

#8. Before I left the 'Star' last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about.

Linwood Barclay

#9. It occurred to me that with all of today's technologies, there were now more ways than ever to know with abosolute certainty that no one wanted to get in touch with me

Linwood Barclay

#10. Sometimes, it's easier to tell a stranger something very personal. It's like there's less risk, opening yourself up to someone who doesn't know you.

Linwood Barclay

#11. We're half an hour from Toronto, which offers everything you could want from a city, and a couple of hours from beautiful vacation country. We have it all here, plus George W. Bush is not our president.

Linwood Barclay

#12. If being an asshole was all it took to get yourself killed, you and I would have been dead long ago.

Linwood Barclay

#13. Switching over to a hybrid car is one of those right things, but, unfairly or not, it still has a reputation among car enthusiasts as something you have to pedal really fast when you're on the ramp merging into traffic on the 401.

Linwood Barclay

#14. I don't subscribe much to the belief that things happen for a reason, that there's some higher power at the controls, directing all of us like we're in some cosmic summer stock production. Shit just happens is more or less my philosophy.

Linwood Barclay

#15. Al Gore, the former vice-president of the United States, lives in a mansion that uses more electricity than the average family's bungalow! David Suzuki rides on a bus that uses more fuel than a Smart car to get across Canada! Oh my God! And this is just the tip of the vanishing iceberg!

Linwood Barclay

#16. These days, my subjects are murder and mayhem and other terrible things that happen to people - things that are even worse than cutting yourself shaving. And these are not the sorts of things you feel the need to experience before you write about them.

Linwood Barclay

#17. threatened Joel, intimidated him into doing it.' But even if that were

Linwood Barclay

#18. It's hard to make things right for everyone."

"But if everybody helped just one person, lots of people would get helped.

Linwood Barclay

#19. I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge.

Linwood Barclay

#20. Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.

Linwood Barclay

#21. My life isn't much different than when I worked full time as a journalist.

Linwood Barclay

#22. All the places my mind took me were places I did not want to go.

Linwood Barclay

#23. She cried herself to sleep, and I held her until she stopped. I rolled over and pushed my face into the pillow. I figured if I could muffle my own crying, I would not wake her.

Linwood Barclay

#24. It's one thing, holding open the door for someone at a grocery store, or the library, or just about anyplace else. But the doughnut shop is a different thing altogether. This is a get-in-and-out-as-fast-as-you-can operation. There's no room for courtesy or chivalry here.

Linwood Barclay

#25. Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'

Linwood Barclay