A Quote by Lee Child

The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.

Lee Child

Quote Topics

Feat Fiction Imagination Most Mystery Sustained Today

Quote Author

Lee Child
British - Writer
Born: 1954

Discovery peaked 30 years ago. It takes no feat of the imagination. It takes no feat of intellect to conclude we now face the corresponding peak in production in 2005.

Gordon Campbell

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.

Georges Braque

This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination.

Stephen King

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

Barry Lopez

I try to be as faithful as possible to the facts as I understand them, but any story is at least partly a product of the imagination. I can comprehend a lot by immersing myself in all of the information I've collected, but my imagination is what brings it to life, and the bridging of that gap - between the received history and the conceived fiction - is both the most difficult and most enjoyable part of the process for me.

Jason Lutes

A mystery is the most stimulating force in unleashing the imagination.

Zuzana Licko

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

Tana French

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present.

Alice Morse Earle

Strange mystery of our nature, that those in whom genius develops itself in imagination, thus taking its most ethereal form, should yet be the most dependent on the opinions of others!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

Jean Baudrillard

There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.

Antonya Nelson

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

Joyce Carol Oates

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.