Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Perry

A musician admitting he avoids suspense novels is a small confession that quietly telegraphs how he manages tension for a living. Suspense, as a genre, is built on engineered anxiety: chapters that end mid-breath, revelations timed like jump cuts, a reader’s nervous system kept on a leash. For someone who already works in a medium where tension is the point - where a pause, a drop, a delayed chorus can feel like emotional brinkmanship - choosing not to marinate in literary suspense reads less like snobbery and more like self-preservation.

The line is also carefully casual. "I do try" signals restraint rather than rule, and "not to spend much time" makes it about bandwidth, not taste. He’s not declaring suspense beneath him; he’s protecting his attention. That matters because suspense is sticky. It demands binge behavior, and binge behavior can flatten your internal rhythms. Musicians live and die by rhythm: the ability to hold back, to release, to pace emotion across minutes rather than pages.

There’s a sly artistic subtext, too. Avoiding the genre that specializes in suspense can be a way of keeping your own sense of suspense unborrowed. Influence is real; so is contamination. If your craft depends on surprising an audience, you might not want your head filled with other people’s tricks. In that light, the quote becomes a neat glimpse of discipline: knowing what overstimulates you, what hijacks your timing, and choosing silence over someone else’s cliffhanger.