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Life & Wisdom Quote by Lee Child

"I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me, and my website has built up a community of readers, which is a lot of fun"

About this Quote

There is something quietly disarming about how Lee Child downplays the machinery behind his success. "A little fact checking now and then" lands with the breezy confidence of a novelist who knows his job is to feel true, not to sound like a dissertation. It is also a wink at the suspicion readers often carry into popular thrillers: Are these details real, or just convincingly staged? Child answers with a shrug that doubles as a promise. He will get enough right to keep the illusion intact, then get on with the only thing that matters: momentum.

The real subject here is not research but access. Email "revolutionized communication" for him in a way that signals a generational shift: a writer who came up in a more sealed-off publishing culture suddenly has frictionless contact with sources, editors, and readers. That matters for a genre built on immediacy. Thrillers run on speed; digital tools compress the distance between question and answer, draft and feedback, author and audience.

Then he pivots to the website, framing community as "a lot of fun" rather than branding, engagement metrics, or platform strategy. The subtext is savvy: the modern author-reader relationship is no longer mediated entirely by reviewers or bookstores. Child treats that direct line as play, not labor, which flatters the reader into feeling like a participant rather than a customer. It's a casual sentence that sketches a whole cultural shift: authority softened into approachability, expertise presented as light touch, and fandom recast as a shared hangout rather than a one-way broadcast.

Quote Details

TopicInternet
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Child, Lee. (2026, January 15). I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me, and my website has built up a community of readers, which is a lot of fun. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-do-a-little-fact-checking-now-and-then-other-147482/

Chicago Style
Child, Lee. "I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me, and my website has built up a community of readers, which is a lot of fun." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-do-a-little-fact-checking-now-and-then-other-147482/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me, and my website has built up a community of readers, which is a lot of fun." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-do-a-little-fact-checking-now-and-then-other-147482/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Lee Child (born October 29, 1954) is a Writer from United Kingdom.

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