49 Quotes by Linwood Barclay

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

How we’re all strangers to one another, how we often know the least about those we’re closest to.

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.

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.

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.