These suspense quotes will inspire you. Suspense, the feeling of excitement or nervousness that you have when you are waiting for something to happen and are uncertain about what it is going to be.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging suspense quotes, suspense sayings, and suspense proverbs.
Best Suspense Quotes
- “We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.” ~ Mary McCarthy
- “Suspense combines curiosity with fear and pulls them up a rising slope.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “Suspense is achieved by information control: What you know. What the reader knows. What the characters know.” ~ Tom Clancy
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“This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “Life is like a novel. It’s filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page.” ~ Sidney Sheldon
- “The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.” ~ Daniel J. Boorstin
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“Even cowards can endure hardship; only the brave can endure suspense.” ~ Mignon McLaughlin
- “Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement.” ~ Alfred Hitchcock
- “Mystery is an intellectual process… But suspense is essentially an emotional process.” ~ Alfred Hitchcock
- “Suspense is torture … but delightful–or there’d be no gambling in the world.” ~ Ada Leverson
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“Be the hero of your own story.” ~ Joe Rogan
- “When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.” ~ Sara Zarr
- “There is no suspense in inevitability.” ~ Damon Lindelof
- “I think one of the appeals of suspense is to safely explore our innermost fears.” ~ Lisa Gardner
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“Suspense is worse than disappointment.” ~ Robert Burns
- “The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.” ~ Mary McCarthy
- “It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.” ~ Jonathan Swift
- “For me, suspense doesn’t have any value if it’s not balanced by humor.” ~ Alfred Hitchcock
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“For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.” ~ Ken Follett
- “The audience wants to be attracted not by the critics, but by a great story. You must deliver to the audience emotion – and when I say emotion, I mean suspense, drama, love.” ~ Dino De Laurentiis , Love suspense quotes
- “I do try not to spend much time reading in the suspense genre.” ~ Thomas Perry
- “The suspense is terrible. I hope it’ll last.” ~ Gene Wilder
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“Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they’re short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.” ~ Sergio Aragones
- “That’s the magic of filmmaking, to draw the audience into an exotic world and keep them there and keep the suspense.” ~ Michelle Yeoh
- “I like being scared every now and then, I like the suspense and the thrills. Nothing like taking a girlfriend to a movie and holding her hand while she jumps.” ~ Scott Foley
- “I try to end every chapter with an air of suspense. I try to leave the reader wanting to turn the page.” ~ Nelson DeMille
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“Learning teaches how to carry things in suspense, without prejudice, till you resolve it.” ~ Francis Bacon
- “Thunderous action and nail-biting suspense” ~ Peter Travers
- “Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.” ~ Guy de Maupassant
- “One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.” ~ John Dewey
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“In suspense novels, even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.” ~ Jeffery Deaver
- “I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.” ~ Danny Boyle
- “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “You are the Hero of your own Story.” ~ Joseph Campbell
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“I think suspense is a big thing.” ~ Gina Philips
- “Luck is everything… My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.” ~ Alfred Hitchcock
- “Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.” ~ Jeffery Deaver
- “Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.” ~ Fawn M. Brodie
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“I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.” ~ Fred Rogers
- “I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn’t know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.” ~ James Patterson
- “Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.” ~ Arthur Symons
- “Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“Obviously neither ‘American Idol’ nor ‘Dancing With the Stars’ is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious.” ~ Tom Shales
- “The Hunger Games has epic spectacle, yearning romance and suspense that won’t quit!” ~ Peter Travers
- “I hunt deer because I love the entire process; the preparation, the excitement, and sustained suspense of trying to match my woods lore against the finely honed instincts of these creatures.” ~ Fred Bear
- “It [horror genre] never dies. It just keeps getting reinvented and it always will. Horror is a universal language; we’re all afraid. We’re born afraid, we’re all afraid of things: death, disfigurement, loss of a loved one. Everything that I’m afraid of, you’re afraid of and vice versa. So everybody feels fear and suspense.” ~ John Carpenter
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“The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!” ~ Evelyn Waugh
- “…that horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.” ~ Irving Stone
- “I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.” ~ Damian Lewis
- “Hitchcock had a charm about him. He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense.” ~ Tippi Hedren
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“Mystery writing involves solving a puzzle, but high suspense writing is a situation whereby the writer thrusts the hero/heroine into high drama.” ~ Iris Johansen
- “I think good suspense and horror is really about creating situations that are relatable, and throwing a wrench in it and watching how people respond to it.” ~ Jason Blum
- “In episodic TV you have to keep things secret to keep the viewer in suspense.” ~ David Giuntoli
- “Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission.” ~ Derek R. Audette , Suspense quotes life
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“I think all good narration contains an element of mystery and suspense. If it didn’t, if the storyline were predictable, we would have no interest in reading it.” ~ James Lee Burke
- “Knowledge does away with darkness, suspense, and doubt; for these cannot exist where knowledge is . . . In knowledge there is power.” ~ Joseph Smith, Jr.
- “I define a thriller as a big-stakes, multiple-viewpoint novel involving suspense, action, and mystery, in which the reader doesn’t know everything but usually knows more than any single character.” ~ F. Paul Wilson
- “There’s something nice and valuable and wonderful about the suspense and the classic horror that doesn’t just crutch on blood and the almost pornographic view of fear.” ~ Amber Heard
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“Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve a problem.” ~ Raymond Chandler
- “I like the idea of building the suspense and taking it all the way up to the very last second with the suspense, and right when you think you can’t take it anymore, then you come in with the joke and kind of break the tension. To me, that’s the best kind of film. I like thrillers, so thrillers with comedy, to me, is always the best.” ~ Corey Feldman
- “When Reason Breaks is infused with a rare blend of suspense and sensitivity, despair and hope. The poetic spirit of Emily Dickinson shines through the gloom of daily struggles faced by modern teens, as they discover the possibilities where they dwell.” ~ Margarita Engle
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“You want to know the hardest thing about being smart?
What?
I pretty much always know what’s going to happen next; there’s no suspense.” ~ Billy Bob Thornton
- “Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.” ~ Ben Marcus
- “We always have the movies that are more toward real life, but they don’t have that much drama or suspense, or we have the full of drama or suspense, but they’re far away from real life. Always when I was watching a film, films with good drama, I was thinking, “I wish they were more close to real life.” But when I was watching real-life films I was thinking, “Well I wish it had more drama.” I’ve tried, in the movies that I worked so far, to get these two things closer and closer to each other.” ~ Asghar Farhadi
