73 quotes
“Tell them ballocks.”
“They’ll pay me five hundred guineas.”
“Cancel the ballocks thing—tell them you’ll be honored and overjoyed.”
“It’s a sellout. I don’t do sellouts. Not for that price anyway.”
Sadly, a lifetime in law enforcement tends not to create a bunch of grateful villains happy that you have shown them the error of their ways, but rather a lot of disgruntled ne’er-do-wells eager for payback.
The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012)
I don’t care one way or the other if the big A is using you to scratch an itch, but think very carefully of actions, Wonky. They have a dismaying tendency to be followed by consequences, and sometimes quite bad ones.
Money had never been a problem in the Book World. All the details of life were taken care of by something called Narrative Assumption. A reader would assume you had gone shopping, or gone to the toilet, or brushed your hair, so a writer never needed to outline it.
Something Rotten (2004)
My father said it was a delightfully odd—and dangerously self-destructive—quirk of humans that we were far more interested in pointless trivia then in genuine news stories.
Lost in a Good Book (2002)
Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
The Eyre Affair (2001)
Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?
The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012)
“Oh!” said Landen, reading a letter. “A rejection from my publisher. They didn’t think Fatal Parachuting Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Again was what they had in mind for self-help.”
“I guess their target audience doesn’t include dead people.”
“You could be right.”
My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offense—which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straightaway.
Something Rotten (2004)
“I’ll be honest,” I said, “I have nothing against anyone who believes, but I think it’s a dangerous nonsense.”
“I am surprised to see you because…you died six years ago!”
“I did?” inquired Mycroft with genuine concern. “Why does no one tell me these things?”
I shrugged, as there was really no good answer to this.
“How is that working out?” I asked.
“Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive.”
To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.
One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011)