“I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'”

American author

James Brendan Patterson is an American author known for a long run of bestselling fiction and for creating the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women’s Murder Club, Maximum Ride, Daniel X, NYPD Red, Witch & Wizard, Private, and Middle School series. His career has also included stand-alone thrillers, nonfiction, and romance novels. His books have sold more than 425 million copies, and he was the first person to sell one million e-books. Many of his novels are written with other authors, with Patterson supplying the story and a coauthor doing most of the writing. That collaborative method has helped make his name as recognizable as the books themselves.