Christopher Bollen
It's always surprised me that mainstream America had the good taste to like R.E.M. It doesn't have the digestible quality the general public tends to look for in its favorite musicians.Collection: America
When you create a fence, you keep people out, but you also limit your mobility.Collection: People
I was never afraid on stage. That's where I was the least afraid. I could just do what I do and I had the amplification and the lights.Collection: Light
I've never had a mentor. I've always wanted one. I'm actually really disappointed that nobody took my under their wing.Collection: Wings
If you've been in the art world for more than eight years, you realize another generation is making the exact same work as the previous generation - but treating it like it's never been done before. It becomes very cyclical very quickly.Collection: Art
The Greeks really believed in history. They believed that the past had consequences and that you might be punished for the sins of your father. America, and particularly New York, runs on the idea that history doesn't matter. There is no history. There is only the never-ending present. You don't even have your family because you moved here to get away from them, so even that idea of personal history has been cut at the knees.Collection: Running
The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town.Collection: Valentine
There's a structure to a detective story that I can easily understand. I understand playing that particular game. It's like solving a puzzle. Or creating a puzzle.Collection: Games
I have to say I do read partly for escapism. Why can't I escape and learn something?Collection: Escapism
I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day.Collection: Morning
I smoke cigarettes when I write, which is disgusting, but it really helps me.Collection: Writing
I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980].Collection: Book
We lost so many talented artists and writers from the generations before ours that we're really lacking older figureheads.Collection: Artist
In a lot of ways, work was my graduate school.Collection: School
You sit at a fashion show in another country and you watch all of these paparazzi swarm around a celebrity, only they're a local celebrity, maybe a soap opera star, so you don't have any idea who they are, you just know they're famous to a bunch of stunned Italians. It's weird, because when you can't identify who a celebrity is, they can just look like overslicked stand-ins. That might sound awful, but what I mean is, when you think about most actresses, even in Hollywood, they really aren't that fascinating or glamorous in their own right once you strip away the flashbulbs.Collection: Country
Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.Collection: School
There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.Collection: Literature
Both my parents were big readers. My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma.Collection: Parent
I like the idea of the book being wiser than the person who wrote it. None of the novels I've written are direct transcriptions of me blathering over dinner with a glass of wine in my hand. I don't hold any illusion of those conversations being of particular value. The books, though, are - I hope - bigger than my opinions, investigations that go beyond my own intellect or wit.Collection: Book
We've come under the influence of television, where in all honesty we can follow a show that could just get cancelled midway through the season and the entire plotline never resolves itself.Collection: Honesty
Someone asked me when it was that I felt confident enough in my writing that I could rely on it as a career. The truth is, I never have. I'm always on the hunt for second, third, or fourth careers. Private detective and cinematographer were previous career choices, but now that I'm older I think I'd be a good portrait painter, rug merchant, or florist.Collection: Writing
I really believe there is something in the nature of a democracy that naturally leads people to distrust the government, to assume because a democracy is built by people just like themselves that there must be secret plots and cover-ups and wizards behind the scenes running the machine.Collection: Running
The death drive is parasitic. It runs off of other drives, leeching off of them.Collection: Running
There's something about fear and aesthetic that go hand in hand.Collection: Hands
I have always wanted to be either a cinematographer or a veterinarian.Collection: Veterinarian
My parents were great parents, but for some bizarre reason they allowed me to watch whatever I wanted on TV, we had cable. And I constantly watched horror movies.Collection: Parent
My strength is character. I'm pretty good at building walking-talking humans with brains like beehives.Collection: Character
I was a very scared child.Collection: Children
I feel that I'm solid at description.Collection: Description
I had lived in New York since 1996, sometimes in the worst neighborhoods, without even locking my door half the time.Collection: New York
I had been going out to Orient for several years.Collection: Years
It is a little out of touch to presume that someone wants to follow your every observation and insight over the course of hundreds of pages without any sort of payoff. That's why writing isn't a one-way street. You have to give something back: an interesting plot, a surprise, a laugh, a moment of tenderness, a mystery for the reader to piece together.Collection: Writing
I've never even done a residency.Collection: Done
Every time I try to write on vacation, I fail miserably.Collection: Writing
I also remember when I watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1990] at, like, age 15. That scared the crap out of me. Because it didn't operate inside the usual conventions of the horror genre in the way that I could accept. I can accept horny teenager counselors being murdered at camp. But I couldn't accept the derangement of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was that anyone could be murdered at any moment - whole families, with no build-up music and no meaning. It terrified me.Collection: Teenager
To this day I still watch tons of horror.Collection: Watches
Going out into the country after living in the city is a loss of control.Collection: Country
One day I want to write a full-on horror book.Collection: Book
You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle.Collection: Writing
Why I love chess and tennis - the volleying aspect, and the fact that your competitors' reactions and motivations and bluffs come into the game itself.Collection: Motivation
As much as I adore Agatha Christie - and I think people make this claim about murder mysteries in general - it's often a very conservative mode of storytelling. Usually it's the greedy, climbing, new-money slimeball who wants to take from the aristocracy.Collection: Thinking
I'm convinced I was the only kid ever who had a Death on the Nile [1978] movie poster and a Murder on the Orient Express [1974] movie poster on his bedroom walls.Collection: Wall
I was obsessed with Agatha Christie in sixth grade.Collection: Obsessed
It's really hard to write about art in general. But it's exceptionally hard to fictionalize art and make work that isn't a parody, or is something that could withstand critique and exist in the art world as a valuable object, or a true piece.Collection: Art
It's always fun to welcome new people into your life. When dating anyone or becoming friends with anyone who has a different profession, a different life, it opens doors. All my friends here do such different creative things. It's so awesome.Collection: Fun
There seem to be two ways of generating interest from the reader: withholding information or by telling the reader on the first page exactly what's going to happen.Collection: Interest
People aren't doing whodunits anymore.Collection: People
Safety, reputation, their lives, their friends, and their world. Writers typically try to avoid that because it's not expedient.Collection: Safety
There are certain moments where artwork might seem like it's part of someone's career - if you really know the art world - , but I did my best to prevent that overlap.Collection: Art
Secrets are never secure because they are always at risk of being found out.Collection: Risk