Writing novels is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki...
Because it’s his bad luck to be the best.
It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.
Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice.
I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.
Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?
Monsters know when they are recognized, just as bores do.
Experience decorates us.
Faith in technique is the religion of the dangerous trades. To go up against an armed felon in a gunfight or to fight him in the dirt you have to believe perfect technique, hard training, will guarantee that you are invincible. This is not true, partricularly in firefights. You can stack the odds in your favor, but if you get into enough gunfights, you will be killed in one.
You don’t even dislike him all the time, hard as that is to believe. Then, if you’re lucky, out of the stuff you know, part of it plucks at you, tries to get your attention. Always tell me when something plucks, Starling.
Live right behind your eyes. Listen to yourself.
Starling, I have to retire in two years. If I find Jimmy Hoffa and the Tylenol killer I still have to hang it up. It’s not a consideration.
Too many was too many, but way too many was just right.
He had had enough of the wideeyed dead.
Often in intense conversation Graham took on the other person’s speech patterns.
They had been in a row, seated along the wall facing the bed. An audience. A dead audience.
A long time ago John Brigham had asked her something and she said no. And then he asked her if they could be friends, and meant it, and she said yes, and meant it.
Primum non nocere. First do no harm.
Oh, Reba, I can’t stand to watch you burn.
He was casting a big Rapala with three treble hooks which his grandfather had given him. He was fishing too fast, casting again and again, retrieving too fast, until he was red-faced and his tee-shirt stuck to him.