To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.
You’re his friend, Jack. Why can’t you leave him alone? ‘Because it’s his bad luck to be the best. Because he doesn’t think like other people. Somehow he never got in a rut.
On the first day his pennant flew from the completed towers, he assembled the prisoners in the kitchen garden, and, mounting his gallows to address them, he released the men to go home, just as he had promised. Many elected to stay in his service, owing to the quality of the provender.
Watch out for the press going in and coming out. Not the real press, the supermarket press. They love Lecter even better than Prince Andrew.
Hannibal stared steadily by candlelight at the faces sketched from his dreams and tried to make their mouths move. Perhaps they would sing at first, and then say their names. Hannibal sang himself, to start them singing.
A police station is a damn poor place to question anybody that you don’t need to scare.
Problem-solving is hunting;.
Pitiful little bodies underneath the sheets, the unclaimed, the starvelings found huddled in alleys, still hugging themselves in death until rigor passed and then, in the formalin bath of the cadaver tank with their fellows, they let themselves go at last.
You may have noticed in the paper yesterday, God dropped a church roof on thirty-four of His worshipers in Texas Wednesday night – just as they were groveling through a hymn. Don’t you think that felt good?
You really must look at me when I’m talking to you,” Kabakov said. “Are you ready to cooperate? Blink for yes. Die for no.
Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it? And taste isn’t kind.
Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved.
Ze zaten op de banken en in rolstoelen naar de radio te luisteren, hun doffe ogen gericht op de vissen of op niets of op iets dat ze lang geleden hadden gezien.
Hevige angst komt in golven opzetten; lang achtereen kan het lichaam dat niet verduren. In de zware kalmte tussen de golven kon Dolarhyde nadenken.
Heavy in her nostrils the smell of the goat.
Speech is never a reliable indicator of how a person writes; you never know. Dolarhyde’s speech was bent and pruned by disabilities real and imagined, and the difference between his speech and his writing was startling. Still, he found he could not say the most important things he felt.
It’s hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well.
The room smelled of wood smoke and rosemary.
For years Lecter had teased the problem, wanting very much for Hawking to be right the first time, for the expanding universe to stop, for entropy to mend itself, for Mischa, eaten, to be whole again.
Clarice, I’m going to leave you here with these remains. Remains, Clarice. Scream your plight into his eyeholes and no reply will come.” He put his hands on the sides of her head. “What you need of your father is here, in your head, and subject to your judgment, not his.
I think of you often.