James Patterson

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

Ultimately, a great thriller is a roller coaster ride. I like to think that's a promise I have never failed to keep, and one that I'd say has served my books well.

You are an endless project... changing, evolving, surprising.

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.

Because whats worse than knowing you want something besides knowing you can never have it

I always figured there would be a kid audience and an adult audience, and there is. That's true for 'Hunger Games' and 'Twilight' and 'Harry Potter.' And 'Maximum Ride,' for sure. In particular what happens is a lot of parents share the books with their kids, and the mom has read it, and the kids, and they talk about it.

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.

Generally I find that kids ask better questions than you get with adults. Something that kids will do a lot is, they're so nervous, and they're not really paying attention, so they'll ask the same question someone just asked. And you're trying to be nice and not embarrass them any more than they are already.

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.

Life is hard, and a lot of people come home tired from work. If they're gonna spend half an hour reading, they want some entertainment and a sense of achievement. So that's what I give them. That's all I'm trying to do. Is that really so wrong?

The best way to get kids reading more is to give them books that they'll gobble up - and that will make them ask for another.

If I'm writing and a chapter isn't coming, I just move ahead.

In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.

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.

Popcorn for breakfast! Why not? It's a grain. It's like grits, but with high self-esteem.

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.

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

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.'

People like to talk more than they like to act. They like to sit there and complain and vent. Somehow they think that changes things, when it doesn't.

I believe we should spend less time worrying about the quantity of books children read and more time introducing them to quality books that will turn them on to the joy of reading and turn them into lifelong readers.

A friend of mine once defined love as finding someone you can talk to late into the night.

My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working.

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.

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.

Hollywood is a peculiar beast - people in Hollywood are nuts.

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.

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.

I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish.

There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading and kids who are reading the wrong books.

Commercial books don't even get covered. The reason why so many book reviews go out of business is because they cover a lot of stuff that nobody cares about. Imagine if the movie pages covered none of the big movies and all they covered were movies that you couldn't even find in the theater?

I'm big on having a blistering pace. That's one of the hallmarks of what I do, and that's not easy. I never blow up cars and things like that, so it's something else that keeps the suspense flowing. I try not to write a chapter that isn't going to turn on the movie projector in your head.

I love to tell stories. It's a delight for me.

Popcorn for breakfast Why not Its a grain. Its like like grits but with high self esteem.

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.

Marty, my mother used to say 'Never get greedy with God.' I think what she meant was 'Don't dare ask for more if you already have what you need.

Half the time when brothers wrestle, it's just an excuse to hug each other.

Half the time when brothers wrestle its just an excuse to hug each other.

The more you read, the better you get at it.

For many years I had heard about an underworld consisting of people who act out a vampire fantasy while I was living in New York. Fortunately for me there are also several books on the phenomena.

My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.

Somebody said the key to life is to work hard, play hard, rest hard, and I've pretty much adopted that.

This summer, I'll be bringing out a mystery that involves a young lawyer and a court scene the likes of which I don't think you've ever seen. Hollywood said this is James Patterson meets John Grisham.

I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation.

I don't get a chance to be funny with the thrillers. I like to be funny, and I think I am really funny. So with 'Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life', it was fun to let loose.

I grew up in a house full of women: my mother, grandmother, three sisters, and two female cats. And I still have the buzz of their conversations in my head. As an adult, I have more female friends than male ones: I just love the way that women talk.

I get up every morning and chop wood, and I pretty much do it seven days a week, and I like to do it. I still have time for my wife and my son, who's 14, and at this point, my head is still above water.

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.

It seemed to me that I could write commercial fiction. I wasn't sure whether I could, or whether I wanted to write serious fiction at that point. So I said, 'Let me try something else,' and I wrote a mystery - but I didn't know much about it.

It's our job - as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles - to find books our kids are going to like.

Other than my hundreds of arrests I really don't have that much experience with the law. While the majority of people aren't corrupt, there certainly is an awful lot of corruption in this country.

Every once in a while, I'll have a 'Do you know who I am?' moment, at least in my head. I hate that.

I don't think of myself as a writer.

Homework is a term that means grown up imposed yet self afflicting torture.

People always come up to me and say, 'you should do standup.' It's nice to discover things about yourself. That keeps everything lively and fun.

The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable.

Always expect the unexpected. Right around Thanksgiving, when the new Alex Cross will be out. It's called Four Blind Mice and it's a pretty amazing story about several murders inside the military.

A good love story always keeps the pot boiling.

Just in case you thought elephants were all sweetness I can attest to the fact that this one had the time of her life scaring the bejeezus out of those dudes.

When your own romantic life is falling apart everyone elses looks fabulous.

A lot of people like the idea of eternal love and eternal romance. The notion of love that is more profound and deeper because it is eternal is very powerful.

Pain is a message, and you can choose to ignore that message.

I was always a good student, but I didn't read that much until I was 18 and I was working my way through college.

I read some, and then visited with people involved in this curious, exciting and somewhat misunderstood sub-culture. I met with a fang maker, who offered to fit me for an exquisite pair.

I didn't care for most of the books I was being asked to read in school. I started reading like crazy right after high school when I got a job in a mental hospital. I was working my way through college, and I did a lot of night shifts, and there was nothing to do. So I read like crazy, serious stuff, all the classics.

The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective.

The vampire underworld is much larger than most people could imagine. It exists in all the cities mentioned in the book, but also in many, many more. Teenagers, especially, seem to like to act out vampire fantasies.