35 Quotes by Jesse Kellerman

All my books deal with the effect of intent upon action, how our understanding of good and evil depends heavily on context.

The most important lesson my parents taught me is that writing is a job, one that requires discipline and commitment. Most of the time it's a fun job, a wonderful job, but sometimes it isn't, and those are the days that test you.

Five people read my work before its ready for publication, and I solicit opinions from all of them: my wife, my agent, my editor, and my parents.

Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences.

It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.

Naturally, it was easier for me to envision becoming a novelist than it is for most people. I had two great in-house teachers; I had parents who considered a career in the arts a real possibility rather than a dreamy arrow shot into the sky.

I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.

I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?

We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.