Quotes from Marcus Sakey

Nobody is accidentally in Alaska. The people who are in Alaska are there because they choose to be, so they've sort of got a real frontier ethic. The people are incredibly friendly, interesting, smart people - but they also stay out of each other's business.

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I lie. I tell them I draw inspiration from the news, the world, my dreams. Or I joke and say that I steal from other writers. I lie because I don't know where ideas come from, and I'm afraid if I look too hard, they'll stop coming.

As the Occupy Movement demonstrated, it's tough to change anything when you're talking about everything.

I'm not at all upset to be considered a crime novelist. But for me, it's never really about the crime or the violence. I'm much more interested in exploring issues.

The first job of a storyteller is to make the reader feel the story, to get the reader to live in the skin of the character.

For me, the best moments in storytelling are the ones where I feel I'm discovering something.

I've always been fascinated by mythology or, in modern parlance, by X-Men or vampires.

But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity? You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions.

She'd always been blunt, to the point that people sometimes mistook her for cold. In truth, she was one of the warmest people he had ever met.

Around here, I'm pretty sure 'us' means Texans, and 'them' means the other seven billion on the planet.

That was the lure of wealth, he'd discovered: a throaty whisper in your ear that you were special, that it was all - this wine, this woman, this world - for you. That it in some way existed only so that you might partake of it.

Maybe that's what love is. Believing in the best version of your partner, so they have the courage to believe it themselves.

And difference, as he learned that day, inspired a particular kind of savagery.

Though now the secretary of defense, Owen Leahy had come up through intelligence, and it showed. His posture suggested that not only would he not comment on the quality of the morning, he would neither confirm nor deny that it was in fact the a.m. There weren't many people who gave off so little to Cooper's eyes.

much of anything. But put a series together and patterns emerged. Some were obvious: haircuts, weight gained or lost, fashion trends. Others required

Cooper said nothing. "Jesus." Quinn rubbed at his eyes. "Wait. How does this get him what he wants? Things are worse now for abnorms than ever before. The microchipping, the hate crimes, hell, every third congressman holding press conferences to say we need to lock you all up.

The lobby was at once attractive and bleak, a place meant to impress without creating the desire to linger.

For a moment, the future threatened to swamp him, the terrifying infinity of it, like being alone in the Pacific in the middle of a starless night, all that water and time around and below him, the deepest hole in the planet sucking him down into darkness.

Be nothing. Be not the spider nor the man nor the future nor the past. Be the moment. Be nothing.

Possible ID, leather jacket." In his ear, the team confirmed the sighting. On the bench, Luisa set down her salad and put a hand on her purse. Vasquez turned to face the guy, his eyes a question. The man in the leather jacket slipped his hand into his right front pocket.

Mom and Dad chatting around mouthfuls of steak while Junior used the scraps of his hamburger to buttress the walls of Fort French Fry.

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. Being an engineer or an architect had once been high aspirations.

A city of unarmed dreamers huddling beneath angry skies.

But not a flag worshipper. He cared about the principles, not the symbol." "That's what patriotism means. The others are just fetishists.