Top 25 Chris Pavone Quotes

I always wanted to write. But honestly I’m glad I didn’t do it back when I was twenty-five or so, when it’s now clear to me that I was a very poor writer and could’ve ruined my career before it even started.

One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature.

At home, I tend to read print, and most of the time, that means recently released hardcover novels. I enjoy the feel of paper and board; I like turning pages, dog-earing my spot, jotting notes in the back.

Expats are a self-selecting group of outgoing, confident people – if you’re not those things, you probably don’t choose this adventure – and the lifestyle is very conducive to making fast, close friends.

We all live in a universe in which we’re either asked to or are forced to accept certain premises about our employment without having the opportunity to verify them.

Although no one loves a typo, it’s close to impossible to eradicate every single little mistake in a manuscript.

There are plenty of paths to becoming a writer, but I think the most reliable ones involve total commitment: writing for magazines and newspapers, teaching writing, editing books, representing authors.

As an unpublished, nonprofessional writer working on my first novel, I nevertheless had access to extremely talented people who would help make my manuscript better, people who’ve made careers out of providing careful, constructive criticism to writers. I’m tremendously grateful to them.

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

‘The Expats’ would not exist without e-books.

After years of working on books, I eventually took a more business-oriented job, for the same sorts of reasons that most people take most new jobs: fancier title, higher pay, opportunities for advancement.

Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.

I use an e-reader when I’m traveling: I love carrying dozens of books on a small lightweight device, and I’m still amazed every time I purchase and immediately start reading a new title without leaving my hotel room – in another country!

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme – core tensions shared by the characters.

What is it we want out of travel? Is it to take snapshots of ourselves in front of famous monuments, surrounded by other tourists? To eat unfamiliar food chosen from unintelligible menus? To earn frequent-flier miles? No. It’s to glimpse what life is like somewhere else.

Although I did admire David Foster Wallace’s final unfinished novel about boredom, I’m no DFW, and I want my books to be exciting, not boring.

I had been very dismissive of popular fiction – in fact, I’d refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren’t the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.

Eventually, I realised that I wanted to try to create something myself, and that’s what writing novels is. Not because I wanted to put myself in front of the world, but because I wanted to create something that would go out into the world.

I’d had 12 different job titles in publishing before I typed ‘The End’ at the bottom of a manuscript page. I thought the manuscript was in great shape; I was pretty proud of myself. Then I sent it to some publishing friends, and they tore it apart.

In most espionage novels, the characters risk their lives trying to save somebody or while protecting a nation from some threat. In ‘The Travelers,’ that’s not what’s going on. I used espionage as a device to heighten the characters’ personal dramas.

There’s so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don’t have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books – and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them – that’s just overwhelming to me now.

After college, I was burdened with student loans to repay, no financial cushion, so I wasn’t in a position to bet everything on a creative-writing career – neither the writing-workshop academia life nor the freelance-writer version, trying to scrape by on short stories and house-painting gigs.

Writing is a solitary occupation; we don’t really have any colleagues.

Whatever’s good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.

Nearly all of us work, a lot: many people spend more waking hours working than doing all other things combined. And nearly all of us spend our lifetimes working for someone other than ourselves.