P. K. ABBOT THRILLERS

There’s no greater agony…

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

— Maya Angelou

Really Seeing…

A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

—Orson Welles

Clear as a Country Creek

I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek.

—Truman Capote

A Quality of Redemption

I’m a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there’s a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

– Michael Connelly

The Well

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

– Ernest Hemingway

Nothing to it…

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

– Ernest Hemingway

Simply the best…

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

– Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s Rules

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

—Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s Golden Ratio…

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety nine pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the waste-basket.

—Ernest Hemingway

Looking into the Abyss

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

– Michael Connelly