Edgar Award Winners

"It is hard for a woman not to like very much an attractive, rich and intelligent older man who adores her and yet who does not lose his good sense and dignity by insisting that she adore him in return."

"Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through."

"By the failures of the world in which I move I have been accused in my time of possessing nearly all the anti-social qualities. It has been said that, both in my business and in my private lives, I have been consistently sly, treacherous, ruthless and rapacious, vindictive, devious, sadistic and generally vile. I could add to that list. But no one, no one, has yet suggested that I would like even condone a resort to violence by others, much less promote or organize the use of it myself."

"In your profession you must have met lots of very rich self-made men, as rich as or even richer than Zander. They always tend to regard themselves as a little above the law, wouldn't you say?"

"[W]hat use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one?"

"Power is for the powerful. Let power fall into the hands of the weak and the rest is tyranny."

"Greta is really a splendid cook and there is nothing Swiss about my wines."

"Latimer turned to watch the subject of these reflections carefully, almost lovingly, adjusting the coffee percolator, and thought how difficult it was to dislike a man when he was making coffee for you."

""Let us hope the bad times are ended for good," [said Mr. Tan.] "Good business for one is good business for all," said Girija. "Very true." Now, Mr. Tan decided, they were coming to the point. Reference to mutual advantage was the accepted preliminary to a squeeze."

"I think that, to begin with, he had intended to kill Dimitrios when he found him, but as he began to get short of money his hatred of Dimitrios became more reasonable."

"Hallett drew a deep breath. "Mr. Nilson," he said, "I wish you could tell me something. Why is it that when an apparently normal, intelligent, law-abiding citizen like you gets hold of a passport and a steamship ticket, he suddenly turns into a juvenile--" "Okay, Mr. Hallett," Greg broke in irritably. "You can't say anything I haven't already said to myself.""

"It came down to this: if I hadn't been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police. I had no choice but to do what this man Harper told me. He was entirely responsible for what happened to me."

"[Ambler's novels are] the well into which everybody had dipped"

"They say that the Devil still quotes the scriptures"

"'Bitter?' He grinned. 'Why on earth should I feel bitter? We were barbarians. You will note that I say "we". I include myself. What would we in our ignorance have done with so much old bird-crap, so much phosphate. Nothing. Our exploitation by the Powers was the best thing that ever happened to us. Even the American bombing was good. Simple people enjoy loud bangs.'"

"He has a one-hundred-and-ten percent British accent. Only other guy I ever met with an accent like it is an Armenian with a Lebanese passport who works for Unesco and was educated at the English High School in Istanbul before going on to the Sorbonne."

"It is absolutely essential that you rid yourself of this absurd idea that I am a criminal or that I have criminal instincts. I am a lawyer who respects the law. Illegality is for the immature and the foolish. The wise man has no need of it."

"You, a British non-com, one of those upper-crust limeys whose voices make them sound as if they're pederasts even when they're not, could never be suspect."

"'May guests be permitted to know what fresh disaster now postpones our detailed examination of your criminal past?' 'Certainly. The house is on fire.'"

"The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week."

"Nicki, my wife, was off in Romania somewhere on a three-week tour with the rest of the troupe. She is an exotic dancer, and if anyone wants to know how it was that a man my age, still vigorous but admittedly a bit the worse for wear, came to have a Greek woman twenty years his junior for a wife, they must ask her. [...] A man is entitled to seek consolation, and an attractive woman is entitled to look for protection. I always handled her business affairs or her, and when she was in a good mood she called me "papa." I may add that Nicki worked because she liked to work, not because I made her do so. I took no commission. She was completely free to come and go as she pleased, and with whom she pleased. I asked no questions. I have regretted our enforced separation very deeply. I went through her things to see if there was anything I could sell."

"President Abraham Lincoln died more than 150 years ago. The "" was so enraged at him for beating them in the Civil War and at his party for ending slavery that they voted Democrat for the next 100 years. Then the Democrats started supporting civil rights for . The Republicans saw the opportunity, courted them and flipped them. The Solid South is now theirs. It has been a long time since the Republican Party has been "the party of Lincoln". Let us put that aside. Is the GOP still the "party of Reagan"? Oh, very much so. And I was recently reminded exactly how much while re-reading a book I wrote during his presidency back in the 1980s: "You Get What You Pay For". As I flipped through the pages, I found myself saying, over and over again, "that's just like Trump"."

"Joe constantly points out that Trump started his campaign with racism, riding down the escalator, attacking Mexicans. Joe thinks this illustrates a difference. Ronald Reagan also started his presidential campaign with racism. He chose to make his kick-off speech in the heart of the Solid South, in Mississippi, quite near where three civil rights workers had been murdered. He said, "I believe in states' rights." It was the biggest dog whistle of the day, code for segregation, and the crowd cheered. He continued: "... we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." It had been the Republican Party that had tried to impose integration after the Civil War. Reagan was making it clear that his party was completely divorcing itself from Lincoln's vision. It was not a one-off. Reagan ran against the "" and against "the strapping bucks" who stood in front of you at the supermarket, buying steaks with food stamps, while you made do with hamburger helper, earned by the honest sweat of your brow. It was a brilliant strategy that turned government programmes into handouts to minorities with money stolen - through taxes - from good white people. It was called the . Reagan did not invent it. But he sold it with warmth, charm, and a smile."

"What he brought to the presidency that was really original was making up stories and never being embarrassed that they were not true. He made up a tale about a mysterious stranger who gave the Founding Fathers the courage to sign the Declaration of Independence. He loved the tale of a bomber pilot who decided not to parachute from his shot-up plane in order to stay and comfort a wounded member of his crew as they plunged to the ground and received the Congressional Medal of Honor ... posthumously ... and told it often, although it had only happened in a movie. He said that he had been present at the liberation of a concentration camp during World War II, though he had never left Hollywood. It used to be that being caught in a lie harmed your credibility, but Reagan, for the most part, got away with it. In doing so he set a new standard that opened the tarnished road that Trump rides down on today."

"Trump may be vulgar, Trump may be abrasive, but in terms of racism, corruption, and destruction, he is Mr Reagan's true heir. Trump's Republican Party is what it has been at least since the 1980s, only more so."

"Justice is a jagged road."

"Oh, the Patriot Act. I read that in its original title, 1984."

"Bad guys do what good guys dream."

"See? That's what happens when you keep people from doing what they do best: It makes them insane."

"Your client's not insane... he's in love. Maybe it's hard for you to tell the two apart, but the law can."

"Beauty, brains, and a complete psycho. My dream girl."

"The search for truth...It's not for the faint-hearted."

"I'll make sure you go away for so long, they'll be planting tomatoes on Mars by the time you get out."

"Just how far up your ass is your head?!"

"Man has only the rights he can defend. Our most basic right is life. It's enshrined not only in our Constitution, but in the charter of the United Nations. The prohibition against taking a life is found in our most ancient texts and in the statutes of every nation. Every murder, whether in Brooklyn, Santiago, Rwanda or Kosovo, demands punishment by whatever legal means possible. Otherwise, the right to life is just an empty promise. The law against murder applies to all. No matter the perpetrator, the victim, or the country where the murder is committed. It is the one moral law that recognizes no national, racial or religious boundaries. It can tolerate no exception. There is one law. One law. And when that law is broken it is the duty of every officer of any court to rise in defense of that law, and bring their full power and diligence to bear against the law breaker. Because Man has only those rights he can defend. Only those rights."

"The more I know, the less I sleep."

"It's not enough to do good. You have to be seen doing good."

"Torture injures everyone who comes into contact with it and corrodes the country that abides it."

"I’m sympathetic to the decent and hapless footsoldier into whose lap falls the unenviable duty of carrying out fubar policies."

"We by nature mistrust authority no matter who wields it—and I think that’s healthy. Though I disagreed with him on the facts, I fully support Rep. Joe Wilson’s right to call out President Obama—I just wish Democrats had had the balls to call out President Bush when he was peddling his lies to Congress."

"In L.A., the only thing within walking distance is your car."

"Nobody's reasonable when they're in love. That's the whole point of it."

"I write about power, that's my real subject - how you get it, what you do with it, how you abuse it. I'm equally wary of liberals and conservatives."

"It is true that one of the first acts of tyrants is to erase history, to wipe out the recorded memory of a people. With that in mind, it's important to remember that the work that we do as writers, artists and performers will form an essential part of the collective memory that future generations will draw upon. And so we owe it to those future generations to defend that memory and be honest witnesses to our times."

"Women write crime better than men do. Men tend to play it safe, relying on an old-boy's network (to get work). Women feel freer. They swing for the bleachers."

"I'm playing legal tiddlywinks with these punks. What I'd really like to do is take 'em up to Battery Park and hang 'em by the scrotum."

"If you're going to play stickball in Canarsie you better learn Brooklyn rules."

"Fiction is, the art of making up something. That's what it's all about, folks. Making stacks of money."

"Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation."

"Off and on during my life, I have passed sleepless nights in making up lists of the dozen or so books a person might choose to take along if suddenly marooned on a desert island. This is a relatively easy game for serious readers: At least half the titles would be recognized classics — the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, a good dictionary, that sort of thing. But occasionally I have made the challenge a little more difficult: "What if you could take just one book?""