Before I became a suspense novelist I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.

For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7 make breakfast and go to work. Or come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

A novelist is like all mortals more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

I believe in a funny way the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

As a novelist I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary sloppy reflection of who I am.