Christopher Bollen Quotes
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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.
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People aren't doing whodunits anymore.
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Every time I try to write on vacation, I fail miserably.
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I had lived in New York since 1996, sometimes in the worst neighborhoods, without even locking my door half the time.
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I'm really much better at asking questions than answering them, since asking questions is like a constant deflection of oneself.
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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.
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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.
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I have always wanted to be either a cinematographer or a veterinarian.
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I've never had a mentor. I've always wanted one. I'm actually really disappointed that nobody took my under their wing.
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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.
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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.
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Secrets are never secure because they are always at risk of being found out.
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I definitely don't take any of intrusions in my private life personally. You learn how to have a sense of humor pretty quickly. I honestly don't keep up on it unless it's something that would hurt someone else. I can take care of myself, that's not the problem. But it's just not fair to bring anyone else into the picture.
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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.
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We lost so many talented artists and writers from the generations before ours that we're really lacking older figureheads.
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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.
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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.
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My strength is character. I'm pretty good at building walking-talking humans with brains like beehives.
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There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.
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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.
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I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time.
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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.
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In a lot of ways, work was my graduate school.
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One day I want to write a full-on horror book.