American - Author | March 22, 1947 -
I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'
James Patterson
GoodCompassionPeopleCoolGoWant
When I was 26, I wrote my first mystery, 'The Thomas Berryman Number', and it was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then it won an Edgar for Best First Novel. Go figure.
BestMysteryDownGoKnowFirst
There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do - or would want to see in real life.
LifePeopleWantEscapeBeyondSee
There are a lot of things we as individuals can't do much about. We can't solve global warming as individuals, or health care problems, but as individuals, most of us can get our kids reading. We can do that.
HealthReadingProblemsCareThings
I have a folder in my office with about 400 ideas in it. So it will take me another 40 years to get through those.
MeIdeasWillOfficeYearsThrough
I'm very conscious that I'm an entertainer. Something like 73 percent of my readers are college graduates, so you can't condescend to people. You've got to tell them a story that they will be willing to pay money to read.
MoneyPeopleCollegeStoryYouWill
What I'm really addicted to is getting people to understand that if their kids aren't competent readers coming out of middle school, it's really going to be hard for them in high school.
SchoolPeopleHigh SchoolUnderstand
Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.
GreatWorldYouSeeingTelevision
I think e-books are terrific in their own right. I love being able to get on a plane and basically carry around seven books and it weigh 10 ounces.
LoveThinkRightCarryOwnGet
You know, I remember watching Morgan Freeman when he did the two Alex Cross movies, and he's so confident that he's going to knock the scene dead. And I'm really confident that I can tell a good story now, so I just don't worry about things.
GoodStoryConfidentWorryRemember
I don't think of myself as a writer.
MyselfThinkWriter
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.
LoveStylePeopleWritingYouFall
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