formula quotes

I thought that writing a detective story would be a wonderful apprenticeship because, whatever people tell you, a crime novel is not easy to write well. As I continued with my craft I became increasingly fascinated by the form and realized that you can use the formula to say something true about men and women and the society in which they live.

-Baroness
  'Series Detectives', collected in Brown and Munro (eds) Writers Writing (1993).

Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end. Larwood

- Philip Arthur Larkin
  On judging the Booker Prize entries for1977, in New Fiction, no.15,  Jan.

I remember summing up what I took to be ourdestiny, in conversation with my best friend at Chartres, by the formula,'Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.'

- C(live) S(taples) Lewis
  Surprised by  Joy, ch.4.