Quote

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

Justin Cronin

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Justin Cronin
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Eastern States
Sunshine
Basically
Characterization
Hero
Stroke
Theory
Brush
Beauty
Brushes
Strokes
Villain
Dirt

More quotes by Justin Cronin

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So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.
Justin Cronin
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It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.
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I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.
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Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.
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One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.
Justin Cronin
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When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.
Justin Cronin
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That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.
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This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.
Justin Cronin
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I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.
Justin Cronin
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It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.
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I saw my one purpose in that moment, looking into that little girls eyes. I was the one who was meant to save her, that was my one purpose all this time.
Justin Cronin
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My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.
Justin Cronin
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Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.
Justin Cronin
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We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.
Justin Cronin
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And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.
Justin Cronin
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Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.
Justin Cronin
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Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.
Justin Cronin
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Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.
Justin Cronin
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One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
Justin Cronin
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If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.
Justin Cronin