"But sometimes I'd feel more fulfilled making Christmas cards with the mentally ill. I want to live and I want to love. I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of."

"Most people keep their brains between their legs"

"I'm here with the cause, I'm holding the torch In the corner of your room- can you hear me? And when you're dancing and laughing, and finally living, Hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly."

"Oh, the alcoholic afternoons when we sat in your room they meant more to me than any, than any living thing on earth"

"There's more to life than books you know, but not much more"

"Hand in glove, the good people laugh, yes we may be hidden by rags, But we've something they'll never have"

"There's a club if you'd like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you, so you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home and you cry and you want to die"

"You shut your mouth, How can you say I go about things the wrong way? I am human and I need to be loved Just like everybody else does"

"I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving, England is mine and it owes me a living"

"In my life Why do I smile At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye ?"

"Why pamper life's complexity when the leather runs smooth on the passenger's seat?"

"I've been dreaming of a time when The English are sick to death of Labour and Tories And spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell and denounce this royal line that still salutes him And will salute him forever."

"(On Timothy McVeigh references) In terms of DOKTOR SLEEPLESS (I don't remember much of TRANSMET), it's just a nod to how quickly we assimilate our monsters. How many years was it between Charlie Manson being the terror of California and Charlie Manson being an image on joke t-shirts? I have a shirt somewhere with a pic of his face and, underneath it, the words CHARLIE DON'T SURF. Hitler's a cartoon figure now. Eminem dressed up as bin Laden within a couple of years of 9/11. It's interesting to me how we defang our nightmares -- by mocking them, but also by wearing their skins."

"A million fucking message boards, email, Twitter, any number of free tools, being limited only by time and your imagination? If I’d had the internet in 1988 I WOULD OWN AN ENTIRE COUNTRY BY NOW AND WOULD PUT HUNDREDS OF YOU TO DEATH EACH DAY JUST FOR FUN AND IT WOULD BE THE LAW"

"I'm not a tyrant, but I can't afford to be merciful. Whatever it is necessary to do, I will do it."

"the lesbian community is under siege, we always try to present to the heterosexual community the idealized version, but I do not think that's a good way to do it, even though I can understand where it's coming from. ("Valerie Miner talked about the kinds of self-censorship she finds in her work when she starts thinking she should present only positive images of lesbians or working-class people.") Yes. In that poem and also in the poem "Night Voice" I do that. There's this whole controversy now over media images of lesbians and gays and bisexuals. It's brought out in movies like Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs where they are presented as killers. It comes up in the novels of P. D. James, where she has these criminals who are lesbians or gay men. And I hate that. But, at the same time, I want the dirty laundry to be out there, whether it's on the Mexican culture or the lesbian culture or the bisexual. And I'm not sure how you do that."

"Marriage is both the most public and the most secret of institutions, its miseries as irritatingly insistent as a hacking cough, its private malaise less easily diagnosed. And nothing is so destructive as unhappiness to social life. No one wants to sit in embarrassed silence while his host and hostess demonstrate their mutual incompatibility and dislike."

"Every novelist write what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality."

"The intention of any novelist must surely be to make that straight avenue to the human heart."

"I don't see why escapist literature should not also be a work of art."

"She came to know a different London and she saw it through different eyes. The city was all things to all men. It reflected and deepened mood; it did not create it. Here the miserable were more miserable, the lonely more bereft, while the prosperous and happy saw reflected in its river and glittering life the confirmation of their deserved success. In her week of seeking, unsuccessfully, for a flat in which she could bear, even temporarily, to live, Philippa felt increasingly depressed and rejected."

"If that was what she wanted to believe, why not let her?"

"You need to decide what you're interested in."

"She couldn't remember when her interest in him, in his mysteriousness, his silences, his power, had grown into fascination, but she knew the precise moment when fascination had sharpened into desire."

"He had disciplined his mind not to speculate; speculation in advance of the facts was always futile and could be dangerous."

"Old age can be very frightening, Commander. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn't just inefficient, he's dangerous."

"I was glad to give up teaching, at least in London, glad to be rid of noise and violence and staff-room politics, and the constant fight to keep order."

"Over the tea Enid said: "You know who controls this estate, don't you?" "Yes, the children." "The kids, the bloody kids. Complain to the police or the council and you get a brick through your window. Tell 'em off and like as not you get an earful of foul language and burning rags through the letter-box next day. And if they catch the little bastards and take them to youth court, what happens? Bloody nothing. They come home laughing. They're in gangs now by the time they're eight." Of course they are, thought Kate. How else can they survive?"

"What condemned a man [in a police investigation] was the inability to keep his mouth shut."

"How fragile was that elegant, complicated bridge of order and reason which the law had constructed down the centuries over the abyss of social and psychological chaos."

"A career which had begun so full of promise but which, like a stream with too feeble a spring, had spent itself with a sad inevitability among the sandy shallows of unrealised ambition."

"But of course she knew it. Chambers was a hotbed of gossip. People spoke in front of her. Gossip permeated the very air as if by a mysterious process of osmosis."

"It had been the good-looking young detective and the woman officer who had interviewed her, and she had sensed that they were quietly sympathetic. But that of course had been deliberate. They had set out to get her confidence and they had succeeded. She was amazed now how much she had confided to them."

"He had learned to be as wary of intuition as he was of superficial judgements, but it was hardly possible to be a long-serving detective officer and not know when a witness was lying. It wasn't always suspicious or even significant. Nearly everyone had something to hide. And it was optimistic to expect the whole truth at a first interview. A wise suspect answered questions and kept his counsel; only the naïve confused a police officer with a social worker."

"Violent death, like most disasters, afforded its satisfactions to those who were neither victim nor suspect."

"...We have a reputation for being difficult. Chambers is a collection of intelligent, highly independent, idiosyncratic, critical and overworked men and women whose profession is argument. It's a dull set which doesn't contain its share of eccentrics and personalities who could be described as difficult. ..."

"He looked more like a professional rugger player than a lawyer, though not when he wore his wig. Then the face became an impressive mask of judicial gravitas. But, thought Langton, wigs metamorphose us all; perhaps that's why we're so unwilling to get rid of them."

"Mrs Buckley was revealed as a slight, nervous-looking woman with a small precisely formed mouth between bulging cheeks, which gave her the appearance of a hamster."

"The street and the houses had a perfection which was almost intimidating. No weed, thought Kate, would surely dare to push its unsanctified tendrils through these carefully tended small lawns and flower beds."

"No one was about, yet he seemed to sense the presence of watching eyes behind blank windows."

"His face was a mask betraying nothing."

"Was there a place for him in this modern world, where systems mattered more than people?"

"They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?"

"How odd, he thought, that one could get used to beauty [i.e. in one's wife]. Once he had thought that any price would be worth paying if he could possess it, know it to be exclusively his, feed on it, be comforted, exalted, even sanctified by it. But you couldn't possess beauty any more than you could possess another human being."

"That he cares."

"That He exists?"

"Oh yes he does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He's supposed to be just. If he wants belief He'd better provide some evidence."

"I don't think God bargains."

"You're going to have to, Xan. You may have to kill her, too."

"I don't want to kill you."