I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
A. B. Yehoshua
I really like suspenseful movies and movies that make you think.
A. J. Cook
What I like about the Carpenter take on 'The Thing' is the fact that it just has so much suspense. It seemed like a different story, with the horror elements.
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.
Alfred Hitchcock
As for suspense, I like to write books that draw you into the hero's plight from the opening pages, where people put their lives on the line for something - a belief, a family member, the truth.
Andrew Gross
Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go.
Andrew Pyper
I think that the romantic suspense that you used to get between people like Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant is much sexier than seeing people taking their clothes off and getting into bed, which is voyeurism.
Anne Reid
Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.
Barry Eisler
'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.
Berkeley Breathed
No, 'F/X 2' was a job. I enjoyed doing it but that was definitely a job. I wrote that, I didn't direct it but 'Candyman' and the earlier horror movies I made, I was completely into horror and suspense and always have been. It's informed everything I've done, even the way scenes are shot in 'Kinsey and 'Gods and Monsters.'
Bill Condon
Good films will run, and people will watch it irrespective of whether it is suspense or a comedy.
Bobby Deol
The thing that interested me, there are so many filmmakers I admire - like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino - they have these themes where there's not much going on, but they were suspenseful.
Bobcat Goldthwait
Any history buffs, people who like religion, suspense and mystery mixed with history, or anyone who likes 'The Da Vinci Code,' needs to read Ken Follett.
Bonnie Somerville
My #1 job as a thriller author is to give readers the best white-knuckle thrill ride I am capable of. I am first and foremost in the entertainment business. If that suspenseful ride is also terrifying because it hits really close to home, then I am once again doing what I am supposed to do as a thriller author.
Brad Thor
The detail of my art depends entirely on the project itself. I tend to be a little more detail-oriented with covers than I am with interior pages, and I try to reduce the detail on action sequences as opposed to suspense passages.
Brian Stelfreeze
I prefer thrillers but when it's thriller/horror, I like it. The gore is not very important to me, I prefer suspense. But I like dark films.
Cecile de France
'Gossip Girl' came out in rapid succession over two years, so the endings always had to be suspenseful so that you couldn't wait for the next one.
Cecily von Ziegesar
If you want to laugh, see a comedy. If you want to cry, see a drama, and if you want suspense, see a thriller.
Charlie Murphy
The beautiful thing about 'The Strain Trilogy' is the ability to move from gore to high fable to creeping dread to domestic drama to unbearable suspense to the uncanny and on and on. The epic journey is designed to support these swings in mood, and that complements my tastes, which are wide-ranging.
Chuck Hogan
I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.
Damian Lewis
There is no suspense in inevitability.
I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.
The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.
I've never done a film before where every single person in the audience knows the ending. I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days. People are blogging your endings from their cinema seats.
The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.
In episodic TV you have to keep things secret to keep the viewer in suspense.
One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.
Suspense is a real tough beast in terms of the filmmaking.
I'm reaching for emotion and drama, the drama of the everyday: what happens when you don't have shelter, food, and clothing. There are some stakes. If you're displaced or evicted, there's a suspense: How will you solve that?
The audience wants to be attracted not by the critics, but by a great story. You must deliver to the audience emotion - and when I say emotion, I mean suspense, drama, love.
I like films that are gritty and hard-hitting and suspenseful. Thrillers, too.
I bought the rights to this book, 'The Ploughmen,' by a Montana writer named Kim Zupan, and I've written the screenplay, and I really feel pretty strong about it. It's really hauntingly beautiful. It's got some suspense and great drama, but it's a real character thing.
I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don't doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.
I think so, Silence of the Lambs was a great, suspenseful thriller and I would expect Red Dragon to be similar. And I think it's very character driven.
I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back.
What drove me to do 'Dead Wake' was that after doing the most preliminary of reading and scoping out what kinds of materials might be available in archives and so forth, I realized that this book - the research, the writing - would present me with a rare opportunity to explore to a full extent the potential for suspense in a nonfiction work.
I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.
Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.
I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.
Even though I don't necessarily believe in everything that's supernatural, I like being scared and I like things that are suspenseful.
I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.
For me, suspense is always harder and better than going for the quick, outright scare.
I think suspense is a big thing.
'Duel' is one of the greatest suspense films of all time.
The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don't know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense - but if you don't know that there's a bomb and it just blows up, then it's just a surprise.
Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.
Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.
One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.
Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.
