Words matter. These are the best Marcus Sakey Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you pick up a copy of ‘A Better World,’ you’ll lose those last five pounds while saving a baby seal under a rainbow. I kid. It’ll be ten pounds.
A decade in advertising exposed me to plenty of schemers and backstabbers. But honestly, advertising is wonderful training for fiction. Writing novels is much easier if you’ve ever tried to write a billboard.
The best thing about writing speculative fiction is the opportunity to satirize the whole wide world. The America in ‘A Better World’ isn’t ours, but it’s pretty close, so I could lampoon everything from partisan politics to the cult of celebrity to our general disaffection. To me, all that is the point.
One of the things that I love about crime novels is that you can turn the volume all the way up. If I can make somebody blow their subway stop, I win.
As the Occupy Movement demonstrated, it’s tough to change anything when you’re talking about everything.
My goal as a novelist is to create smart entertainment, books that keep bright people up too late, that make them want to read just one more chapter. Books that have ideas threaded in amidst the thrilling bits, ideas that I hope linger even after people close the book.
The thing I’m always trying to do when I write is hit that sweet spot where the book both keeps you up late at night, and yet a week after you’ve finished, it still pops back into your head.
When I write, I try not to cast in my head, because then I’m writing to a major movie star, and it picks up those ticks, and that’s not what I want to do.
As an author, it’s a strange process to watch your novel turned into a movie. It’s tremendously exciting but somewhat voyeuristic; after all, novelists are rarely involved in the process.
For me, the best moments in storytelling are the ones where I feel I’m discovering something.
For me, one of the hallmarks of a really great book is that I’m seeing it in my head while I’m reading.
I like female characters that are strong in their own right and not because the author said so.
I’ve always been fascinated by mythology or, in modern parlance, by X-Men or vampires.
I like really sharp flavors, and I like contrasts. Something sweet and sour at the same time is a big win.
My novels are never directly based on a true crime incident, but I want to get the details right. I want to know how homicide detectives think, what a SWAT team might do to prepare.
In 1791, the right to bear arms to defend against an over-reaching government wasn’t theoretical. Today, it’s hard to imagine physical weapons serving the same purpose. But it’s easy to see how hacktivists might – especially if you broaden the opponents to include hate groups and rapacious multinationals.
Honestly, I don’t focus on what my writing is called. I don’t mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can’t think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.
