Caleb Carr Quotes

Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.

The definition of terrorism is killing civilians with the intent of changing their political affiliation.

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

People are disturbed enough by serial killers, but the whole notion of female violence, particularly maternal violence - the idea of mothers who kill - really unnerves people.

Warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind. Terror must never be answered with terror.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.

I get in trouble when I say things like, 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

If you're gonna catch criminals, you got to be a bit of one yourself.

Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara's answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

... belief that the answers one gives to life's crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.

Still, it's an interesting technique-leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.

I believe half of a writer's job is to, really, take you to another world and give you a view of things, information about another world that entertains you and informs you.

It didn't make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don't deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences.

there's plenty of stories that need telling what never get told, just because people can't bear the listening. My

How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?

You want to believe that there's one relationship in life that's beyond betrayal. A relationship that's beyond that kind of hurt. And there isn't.

most men consider their rationally selected actions are in fact idiosyncratic responses that have grown strong enough, through repeated use, to overpower other urges and reactions - that have won, in other words, the mental battle for survival.

Change isn't something that most people enjoy, even if it's progressive change.

Both Kreizler and I had seen all this before, but familiarity did not breed acceptance.