Marcus Sakey

“I like female characters that are strong in their own right and not because the author said so.”

“As the Occupy Movement demonstrated, it's tough to change anything when you're talking about everything.”

“The best thing about writing speculative fiction is the opportunity to satirize the whole wide world. The America in 'A Better World' isn't ours, but it's pretty close, so I could lampoon everything from partisan politics to the cult of celebrity to our general disaffection. To me, all that is the point.”

“The first job of a storyteller is to make the reader feel the story, to get the reader to live in the skin of the character.”

“I make no promises every book will be about Chicago, but it's so inspiring. It's a city of such contradictions. I love to write about it.”

“The thing I'm always trying to do when I write is hit that sweet spot where the book both keeps you up late at night, and yet a week after you've finished, it still pops back into your head.”

“Honestly, I don't focus on what my writing is called. I don't mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can't think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.”

“My novels are never directly based on a true crime incident, but I want to get the details right. I want to know how homicide detectives think, what a SWAT team might do to prepare.”

“I've always been fascinated by mythology or, in modern parlance, by X-Men or vampires.”

“When people ask me where I get my ideas, I lie. I tell them I draw inspiration from the news, the world, my dreams. Or I joke and say that I steal from other writers. I lie because I don't know where ideas come from, and I'm afraid if I look too hard, they'll stop coming.”

“That was the lure of wealth, he'd discovered: a throaty whisper in your ear that you were special, that it was all - this wine, this woman, this world - for you. That it in some way existed only so that you might partake of it.”

“Part of the fun of writing is having messages. Without them, it's all gunfights and car chases, and none of it means anything.”

“I write crime novels and thrillers - I'm a big fan of cops. You can never forget that they run towards what everyone else runs away from.”

“It's like tossing a dart," he'd said. "There's nothing amazing about it. You throw and it sticks somewhere. But if you try and backtrack every factor that led there, the force of the throw and the angle and the air resistance, all of it had to be perfect, just exactly right, for it to end up where it did.”

“When I write, I try not to cast in my head, because then I'm writing to a major movie star, and it picks up those ticks, and that's not what I want to do.”