Simon Toyne

“All writers steal. You might as well steal from the best.”

“The largest two books I've ever read more than once are 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens and 'The Stand' by Stephen King, about 1,200 pages each.”

“We can make a concerted effort to stop poisoning the planet: that would be a good way of appeasing the gods.”

“I looked back at the years since I'd left college and thought of the list of things I'd have liked to do. I'd always wanted to write a book - not a small undertaking. I never felt I had the...”

“As a television producer, you do a lot of writing - drafting proposals for pilot shows and other things, so yes, a good deal of writing was involved.”

“Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.”

“We have long suspected that the faceless organisations that run our world - be it the church, multinational conglomerates or the government - keep things from us.”

“My family and I live in a wing of a Georgian mansion in East Sussex, which was built in the 1780s and fell into disrepair. It was rescued in the Seventies and carved into six terrace houses.”

“I love researching all sorts of weird stuff. I always say, 'God help me if the FBI came across my Internet search history.'”

“I figured if I write a modern thriller but spliced in the DNA of a classic western - the drifter who comes into town with secrets - I could do something interesting with both genres. Western...”

“I think 'The Searcher' is a departure from my first because it's less grounded in religion and is far more rooted in the mythic tradition: more of an existential thriller where the main char...”

“It is easy to be inspired by history when you're living in a part of it and allow that to seep into your writing: having said that, a minimalist room with no distractions is often better; th...”

“If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture.”

“'The Searcher,' as the title suggests, is about someone in search of something, and I have always loved quest stories and so was drawn to writing one myself.”

“I wrote 'The Searcher' because I love westerns, and they've fallen out of fashion.”

“'Solomon Creed' is a man who knows everything about everything but nothing about himself and is on a journey of redemption to try and reclaim his identity.”

“Quest stories are about the oldest form of narrative there is, and they're also the perfect metaphor for life because we're all on a journey trying to figure out where we're going and who we...”

“I'm certainly not the first author to tiptoe into the conspiratorial, religious-tinged territory, but - and I hate to break this to the faithful - neither is Dan Brown.”