David Anderson > David's Quotes

“It’s very important not to talk down to kids, and to give them something which they think is quite grown-up and hardcore. Kids themselves are very good at self-censoring. If they don’t like something, if they think it’s too strong for them, they’ll simply stop reading. That's the thing about a book, you can’t force someone to read it. . . . I think there’s a lot in my books about friendship, leadership, about society and how it works, how we learn to live with each other and what skills we need to make a viable society. Kids don’t need to know any of that, they just want someone to be eaten again.”
― Charlie Higson

“Thrillers, like all genre fiction, remain for the most part “beneath.” There is a feeling in literature, more than any other art form, that books meant to simply entertain must be flawed. There is an entire cache of what critics call “beach reads,” books that are disposable, forgettable, anti-literary.

And this is where I have changed the most as a reader and also as a writer. As I began to dig in to a lot of thrillers, I came to believe that entertainment and reading for pleasure can be transcendent; that while art might be a hammer it is also a mirror, changeable and subjective. And there is a point where the boundary of the thriller genre rubs hard against a much more vast literary tradition. A lot of great writers exist on this axis.”
― Will Lavender

“For myself I have now no faith in miraculous conception. I have given it every chance. I have spent many mornings at Lord’s hoping that inspiration would come, many days on golf courses; I have even gone to sleep in the afternoon, in case inspiration cared to take me by surprise. In vain. The only way I can get an "idea" is to sit at my desk and dredge for it. This is the real labour of authorship with which no other labour in the world is comparable.”
― A. A. Milne