Top 18 Megan Abbott Quotes

I think it was Freud who said that we’re all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.

I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.

I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they’re this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.

I don’t really consider any of my novels ‘crime’ novels.

I’m always fascinated by how different writers‘ rooms work.

On ‘The Deuce,’ the writers’ room gets like group therapy.

I’ve consumed true crime since first discovering ‘Helter Skelter’ by Vincent Bugliosi in a used bookstore at age 9 or 10 and staring in fascination and horror at the crime-scene photos in the middle.

There’s this notion of women‘s bodies being out of control – so out of control that men don’t understand it at all.

Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.

I don’t think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in – I think that would be a terrible book.

True crime has long been a passion for me, but I’m also a sucker for biographies, particularly of politicians, writers, or Hollywood icons.

I never quite know how to fill that anxious, semi-wasted time before a midday flight home.

I’m ashamed how little science fiction I’ve read.

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

When ‘Dare Me’ was first in development, it was hard to make the case for why it’d be interesting to anybody other than teenage girls. It’d often be treated, like, on first glance, ‘What is this? ‘Pretty Little Liars?’ ‘Mean Girls?” It never was that.

I come from a family of readers. Our house smelled of book.

I’ve come to believe that what draws women to true crime tales is an instinctual understanding that this is the world they live in.

I thought labs were such cinematic, spooky spaces.