English - Novelist | July 2, 1961 -
I do have a touch of OCD, and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton.
Mark Billingham
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An actor's life is all about rejection. It's you they don't want; it's you who's too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn't matter what you look like.
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My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst.
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More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.
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As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.
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As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'
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When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.
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I think women tend to write about how violence feels, whereas men tend to write about what violence looks like.
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I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.
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I think readers' imaginations are far more powerful than anything you can put on a page and, therefore, can conjure up graphic images for themselves, which I think you just have to nudge them towards.
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I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.
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Like my fictional protagonist Tom Thorne, I love country. My tastes go back a bit further than his do, and I still listen to stuff from the late '70s and early '80s.
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