Quotes from Chris Pavone

Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.

Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.

Nearly all of us work, a lot: many people spend more waking hours working than doing all other things combined. And nearly all of us spend our lifetimes working for someone other than ourselves.

If you can't figure out how to make the beginning of your book compelling, you're probably not writing a compelling book.

Sometimes, I had very little - if any - idea for whom I was really working: at the end of the day, who reaped the profits? Was it a privately controlled German foundation or a global array of stockholders? A middle-class guy on the Upper West Side or Rupert Murdoch? Were we pursuing mere profit, or self-perpetuation, or something bigger?

I give tremendous weight to my positive reviews and none whatsoever to my negative ones.

There's so much published by so many different publishers. Most of the time, I don't have to confront that, but walking into a conference center filled with books - and people buying them or not buying them, being interested or not interested in them - that's just overwhelming to me now.

One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature.

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

Everyone has secrets, and I think some people flee from home - far from home - to try to keep those secrets.

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme - core tensions shared by the characters.

Eventually, I realised that I wanted to try to create something myself, and that's what writing novels is. Not because I wanted to put myself in front of the world, but because I wanted to create something that would go out into the world.

I loved editing, and being a cookbook editor is a really a great job.

'The Expats' is a thriller, but one that tends more toward general fiction than toward breathless pulp.

I worked as a draftsman for the Department of Environmental Protection, and as a teacher, in N.Y.C.; at a big bank and a small ad agency, a tiny law firm and a few giant ones; as a cashier and a dishwasher; preparing deli sandwiches and stringing tennis racquets and pruning evergreens into conical Christmas-tree shapes.

After years of working on books, I eventually took a more business-oriented job, for the same sorts of reasons that most people take most new jobs: fancier title, higher pay, opportunities for advancement.

I'd had 12 different job titles in publishing before I typed 'The End' at the bottom of a manuscript page. I thought the manuscript was in great shape; I was pretty proud of myself. Then I sent it to some publishing friends, and they tore it apart.

I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.

Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.

A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'

There are plenty of paths to becoming a writer, but I think the most reliable ones involve total commitment: writing for magazines and newspapers, teaching writing, editing books, representing authors.

Before I wrote my first novel, 'The Expats,' I spent nearly two decades at various arms of publishing houses such as Random House, Workman, and HarperCollins, mostly as an acquisitions editor. But a more accurate title for that job might be rejection editor: while I acquired maybe a dozen projects per year, I'd reject hundreds upon hundreds.

In 'The Travelers,' everyone is defined by his or her relationship to work. I put each character on a different rung of the ladder: from the lowliest assistant to a powerful man in the world of media.