Words matter. These are the best Linwood Barclay Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
My life isn’t much different than when I worked full time as a journalist.
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.
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.
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.
When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did – crank out a book a year. The only problem – and it was a considerable one – was that I stank.
Before I left the ‘Star’ last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about.
Facebook, from what I can tell, is the virtual equivalent of dropping into the homes of several million people, all of whom say at the same time: ‘Hey! Let’s set up the slide projector!’
I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge.
