top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Events quotes
"I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript."
"To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events."
"In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe all that appeared to me most important and interesting among the events and the scenes that came under my notice during my sojourn in the interior of Africa."
"I am one of the 11.5% of New Yorkers who remain traumatized by the events of September 11."
"By moving them vertically, a representative mean curve could be formed, and individual events were then characterized by individual logarithmic differences from the standard curve."
"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention."
"Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters."
"At all events, arbitration is more rational, just, and humane than the resort to the sword."
"I am personally saddened and stunned by the tragic events that took place in Red Lake."
Explore more quotes by Ken Follett
"I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult."
"There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era."
"World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years."
"When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?'"
"James Bond is quite serious about his drinks and clothing and cigarettes and food and all that sort of thing. There is nothing wry or amused about James Bond."
"The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying."
"With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn't know that then."
"Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative."
bottom of page