Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

by Patricia Highsmith

A book is really a long continuous process, which, ideally, should be interrupted only by sleep.

Writing is a way of organizing experience and life itself, and the need of this is still present though an audience may not be.

Baudelaire, said that the only good parts of a book are the explanations that are left out.)

Varying the professions of the story’s characters is one of the hardest things for a writer to do after three or four books, when he has used up the few he knows about.

I have said little about other people’s suspense books, mainly because I seldom read them,

It is in the story that enduring value lies. Morals and social behavior change over the decades, yet film and television writers are still mining away at the works of Henry James, because he always told a good story.