Suspense Fiction Quotes

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense. ~ George R R Martin

Stephen King, by far, is the standard-bearer. I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish. I read his book 'On Writing' before I read pretty much any of his fiction. ~ Michael Koryta

Because of men like him, God had made warriors like Leif. To do violence on behalf of the innocent. ~ Ronie Kendig

An astonishing debut. Brilliantly conceived, masterfully written, Stuart Neville's THE TWELVE is both a heart-pounding thriller and a stunning examination of responsibility and revenge. He is going to be a major new voice in suspense fiction. ~ Jeff Abbott

Dawn cackles as she guides me through the all-glass porch. Thinner, paler Reina shuffles about behind Dawn, watching as I slip my boots off. Although she tries to hide her hands, her fingers flicker nervously. I place my boots neatly on the floor of the porch beside the other pairs in the shadows under the coats. Music drifts through to us from a distant room – it's the Beach Boys' California Dreamin'. Dawn looks at me and I smile – they've put the record on for me. Dawn nods along happily. 'Hear you're a surfer boy!' she says and she mimics riding a wave. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Let her go… Because that girl has got to die so that you may live. ~ Sanjida Kay

My father continued to tinker on the lawnmower, repairing or destroying it, it was hard to tell. If curses were magic words, the machine would've run like a charm in no time. It probably could've mowed the lawn by itself. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers.
They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better. ~ Jack Ketchum

What's your version of the perfect guy?"
"I guess I'd like someone who proves he cares by his actions instead of just saying it all the time."
"That's reasonable."
"And I'd like someone who has his own life, too. You know I work a lot of hours at the hospital, and I like what I do. I imagine I'd come to resent a guy who expects me to work a nine-to-five schedule just because it fits his needs."
"Anything else?"
"But he still has to be - " she cut herself off.
"Good in bed? ~ Tami Lund

In any story where solutions to mysteries are found, there should always be at least one mystery which remains unsolved. ~ Sean Terrence Best

I am standing front and center. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Come Amara, play with me. Let's finish our game of hide and seek… ~ Mya Gray

I don't believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening. ~ Elena Ferrante

I had a dream about you. We were two lovers disguised as librarians. We met in the non-fiction section, and that's the truth. Or at least that's what we told your parents. They didn't need to know where we really met - in the smut section, the corner with all the political biographies. ~ Jarod Kintz

Congrats, bro. You've just sold your soul to the devil. Wait. You don't have a soul. ~ Jayde Scott

No, I thought. No way. I love her too much. I would never do that. And then again, those two words, her voice, exploding inside my head: "Tyler, wait! ~ Amy Hatvany

I argue that the Jesus of the Gospels is essentially a myth. The Gospels are largely fiction. They were created around the turn of the first and second century in order to give concreteness and substance to the Jesus who, as the Messiah, had appeared to Paul and his fellow apostles in ecstatic visions. ~ Alvar Ellegard

If there was one advantage of the numerous lifetimes he'd been forced to endure, it was undoubtedly knowledge. ~ Ross Turner

An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake. ~ Harlan Coben

There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You might have passed any one of them upon the street, and thought nothing; but the effect of their appearance all combined was rather queer. They were dressed, not strangely, but somehow distinctly. They wore skirts - but the kind of skirts a tailor might design if he were set, for a dare, to sew a bustle for a gent. Many seemed clad in walking-suits or riding-habits. Many wore pince-nez, or carried monocles on ribbons. There were one or two rather startling coiffures; and there were more neckties than I had ever seen brought together at any exclusively female ensemble. ~ Sarah Waters

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction. ~ Jack Vance

Whatever may be the sociological value of the legal fiction that 'all men are born free and equal,' there can be no doubt that ... in its biological application, at any rate, this statement is one of the most stupendous falsehoods ever uttered by man through his misbegotten gift of articulate speech. ~ Earnest Hooton

I have a tendency to break rules and shake things up. I would say that with me people never know what is real and what is fiction. And I like that because reality is relative. ~ Nuno Roque

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable. ~ Richard Dawkins

Your pretense does not fool me, gnome. My eye will be upon you. ~ Cassandra Clare

I am going to show you great and mighty things which no one has ever seen before ... I am going to take you places where no one has ever been. I am going to take you to heights where no one has ever reached. If you will only come to me with all your heart, I will do a mighty work in you, which no man can undo but yourself. ~ M.J. Chrisman

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument "whose strings buzzed," and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Her abdomen clenched as he thrust hard once, filling her completely. Surprising her, he didn't start thrusting, but remained still inside her as he continued kissing her.
She could kiss the sexy man for hours, be consumed by the taste and feel of him.
"Move, damn it," she gasped. She was aware the demand sounded a lot like begging. She was beyond caring. She needed more, more, more. ~ Katie Reus

If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters. ~ Jane Gardam

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one. ~ Michael Montoure

Who needed facts when fiction was so much more titillating? ~ Dee Tenorio

Things so seldom go exactly the way we plan. ~ Avery Flynn

I want to be a good man, a good writer."
"Be one or the other, Ernest, not both. ~ Naomi Wood

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion, ~ George Saunders

You are mighty and strong! You made it against all odds. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

...at it's best fiction is medicine. ~ Dean Koontz

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary. ~ Sarah Hall

I could have drowned today. If they hadn't been screaming my name so loudly and if I hadn't woken up, I would have drowned. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

The report made a science fiction-like case that the president was within his constitutional rights to reinterpret congressional legislation to conform more closely to his own desires, or to simply refuse to carry out laws with which he did not agree, or that, the report harrumphed, "unconstitutionally encroach on the executive branch." In sum, anything the president doesn't want to do he doesn't have to do; anything he wants to do, consider it done. ~ Rachel Maddow