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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
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. James Patterson Read Quote
