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! Linwood Barclay Read Quote
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. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
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.’ Linwood Barclay Read Quote
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. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It’s elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don’t know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. ‘Trust Your Eyes’ is the best book I’ve written, and I don’t know if I can do any better. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
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. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
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. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
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. Linwood Barclay Read Quote
