Ken Follett Quotes

• Fear could paralyse. Action was the antidote.

  Ken Follett

  Topics in Fear

• The polite fiction that the Prime Minister’s advisers are responsible is absurd. Control-freak Tony doesn’t let Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson go around saying anything they like… Peter isn’t the Prince of Darkness, though he may be Lady Macbeth.

  Ken Follett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• They are the rent boys of politics.

  Ken Follett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

  Ken Follett

• 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.

  Ken Follett

• 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.

  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.

  Ken Follett

• 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.

  Ken Follett

• We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

  Ken Follett

• For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.

  Ken Follett

• 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.

  Ken Follett

• In my books, women often solve the problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she’s a strong character. She does change the plot. She’ll often rescue the male character from some situation.

  Ken Follett

• 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?’

  Ken Follett

• I use a professional researcher in New York who does all the legwork, all that stuff which would take me days and weeks of calling, waiting for people to call back.

  Ken Follett

• Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.

  Ken Follett

• My favorite period is World War II, and I’m in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

  Ken Follett

• With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn’t know that then.

  Ken Follett

• An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.

  Ken Follett

• The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the 20th century.

  Ken Follett

• The CIA’s research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.

  Ken Follett

Ken Follett (30)

Birth:	5th June, 1949
Nationality:	Welsh
Profession:	Novelist

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Today's Anniversary - 2nd November

Births

• 1936 - Rose Bird
• 1914 - Ray Walston
• 1942 - Stefanie Powers
• 1942 - Shere Hite
• 1965 - Shahrukh Khan

Deaths

• 1963 - Ngo Dinh Diem
• 2000 - Robert Edmond Cormier
• 1970 - Richard Cardinal Cushing
• 1975 - Pier Paolo Pasolini
• 2004 - Theo van Gogh