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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
Villain
Dirt
Sunshine
Basically
Characterization
Hero
Stroke
Theory
Brush
Beauty
Brushes
Strokes

More quotes by Justin Cronin

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If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.
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.
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What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.
Justin Cronin
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I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.
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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.
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
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This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.
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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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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And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
Justin Cronin
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It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.
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.
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.
Justin Cronin
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Here she was, a women who could bolt-load a crossbow in under a second, put half a dozen long arrows in the air in fewer than five, blade a target dead through the sweet spot at six meters, on the run, on an off day and yet knitting a pair of baby booties seemed completely beyond her power.
Justin Cronin
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The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.
Justin Cronin
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So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.
Justin Cronin
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If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.
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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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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I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels.
Justin Cronin