Chris Pavone Quotes
-
I worked as a draftsman for the Department of Environmental Protection, and as a teacher, in N.Y.C.; at a big bank and a small ad agency, a tiny law firm and a few giant ones; as a cashier and a dishwasher; preparing deli sandwiches and stringing tennis racquets and pruning evergreens into conical Christmas-tree shapes.
-
Who will want to write if writing doesn't pay?
-
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.
-
I loved editing, and being a cookbook editor is a really a great job.
-
A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'
-
'The Expats' is a thriller, but one that tends more toward general fiction than toward breathless pulp.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.
-
I'd sometimes go to Paris by myself - it was an easy two-hour train ride - to get a break from the everyday grind, to walk around a big city, ride a subway, feel the energy of a world capital.
-
I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
If you can't figure out how to make the beginning of your book compelling, you're probably not writing a compelling book.
-
In 'The Travelers,' everyone is defined by his or her relationship to work. I put each character on a different rung of the ladder: from the lowliest assistant to a powerful man in the world of media.
-
When I was in my mid-twenties, I was a copy editor at Doubleday, and for a brief period, it was my job to help shepherd Pat Conroy's 'Beach Music' into the world.
-
There's always something at least a little smug about self-reference - magazine articles about idealistic journalists, TV shows about TV actors, ironic films within ironic-er films: all this meta-media populated by thinly disguised characters making oblique inside jokes.
-
Every book that doesn't first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.
-
Everyone has secrets, and I think some people flee from home - far from home - to try to keep those secrets.
-
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.
-
One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature.
-
As a book editor, you need to pitch every one of your books again and again, dozens of times, for months on end. From a quick conversation with your boss or a letter that'll be read by just one person, to a five-minute speech in front of 50 colleagues or cover copy that'll be in front of millions of eyes.
-
Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.
-
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.