Chris Pavone

“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.”

“I give tremendous weight to my positive reviews and none whatsoever to my negative ones.”

“'The Expats' would not exist without e-books.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Writing is a solitary occupation; we don't really have any colleagues.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Kate was never going to understand the extent to which men were stupid.”

“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.”

“I loved editing, and being a cookbook editor is a really a great job.”

“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.”

“I'm concerned, as I guess all middle-aged people are, about the younger generations' level of literacy.”

“Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.”