There are a lot of people who don’t like a lot of people but they don’t go around the place murdering them.
Have we killed everyone who needs killing?
The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.
He had known then, not that he had ever doubted it, that even if God existed He preferred not to listen, and all the stars, crosses and crescent moons in the world would not make an iota of difference.
You know, they say in America that the average child sees eight thousand murders before they leave elementary school. Makes you think, doesn’t it.
It’s a simple fact of life that a clever private detective needs a much less clever police officer in much the same way as a photograph needs both light and darkness.
It is true that we have many ways of coping with loss,’ he said. ‘And grief is never rational.
These people... I’ve never come across anyone like them. You want the truth? They make Scorpia look like a vicar’s tea party.
He was an invisible man with no background and no foreground, and plans, strategies and conspiracies he would have taken with him to the grave.
It’s easy enough to change your personality, to become evil. The trouble is, it stays with you. And it damages you.
That’s why life is so different to fiction. Every day is a single page and you have no chance to thumb forward and see what lies ahead.
I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.
Ban Nab. It’s a palindrome.’ He said nothing, so I added: ‘It reads the same forwards and backwards.’ ‘Do geese see God?’ Hawthorne asked.
So that was it: an unhealthy chef, a blind psychic, a war historian, a children’s author, a French performance poet, Hawthorne and me. Not quite the magnificent seven, I couldn’t help thinking.
Theatre, at its best, is a candle that never goes out and all of these productions, along with many more, still burn in my memory.
I’ve made some tea,’ Judith Matheson said. Of course she had. She was the sort of woman who would always make tea no matter what the crisis. Lose your leg in a hideous industrial accident and she’d be there with a nice cup of Earl Grey.
Moxham was strikingly beautiful, the sort of place that turns up in jigsaw puzzles or Harry Potter films.
The grieving widow,’ Hawthorne muttered. ‘Do you think so?’ ‘No, Tony. I’ve seen more grief at a Turkish wedding. If you ask me, I’d say there’s a lot of things she’s not telling.
You can call it that if you like, but what was I to do? I was desperate. I would have had to move out. I had no job, no income, nowhere to go. Philip was in the cemetery and nobody cared about me.
Oh, and since the state received a thousand dollars in federal funds for every child taken into custody, it was a nice little earner.