Christopher Fowler Quotes

It is said that the hallmark of a gentleman is that he is only ever rude intentionally. Arthur Bryant was no gentleman. His rudeness came from an inability to cloak his opinions in even the most cursory civility. He believed in good manners at the meal table and bad manners almost everywhere else.

Clutter, either mental or physical, is the sign of a healthy curiosity.

The clouds of night opened like ink blossoming in water.

We spend our youth attempting to change the future, he explained, and the rest of our lives trying to preserve the past.

Throughout history, human nature remains unchanged. The world's oldest questions are still being asked. Medea, Oedipus, we're not adding anything that the Greeks didn't already know.

My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conceived Sherlock Holmes, why didn't he give the famous consulting detective a few more quirks: a wooden leg, say, and an Oedipus complex? Well, Holmes didn't need many physical tics or personality disorders; the very concept of a consulting detective was still fresh and original in 1887.

It's hardly a wonder that they call London the most elusive city in the world. Its character changes from one street to the next. There's no rhyme or reason, no pattern to the place. You could take six people at random from the centre of town, ask them to write down all the places they visit regularly and find that their circles of movement don't overlap at more than one or two points. Each of them would see a different city.

If any lesson from war is to be learned, John, it must be always to prepare for the unexpected and face the unthinkable.

Kim Newman brings Dracula back home in the granddaddy of all vampire adventures. Anno Dracula couldn't be more fun if Bram Stoker had scripted it for Hammer. It's a beautifully constructed Gothic epic that knocks almost every other vampire novel out for the count.

They'll be working through until it's done, so Janice has gone to KFC for a bargain bucket. They're dining al desko.

My father worked in a scientific lab where he designed and built glass instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job and once constructed a human brain in glass just to show off his skills.

I wouldn't like to find out my GP was messing about with black magic. It would be like discovering that your bank manager was also a stand-up comic.

I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will.

When may did so, he found every cup and saucer, plate, vase, and bowl standing arranged across the floor like pieces in a scaled-up chess game.
"The Whitstable family tree," Bryant explained, entering and setting down his tea tray. "It's the only way I could get it sorted out in my head. I had to see them properly laid out, who was descended from whom." He pointed to a milk jug. "Daisy Whitstable is bottom left-hand corner, by the fireguard. Next to her is the egg cup, brother Tarquin ... Now, pass me Marion and Alfred Whitstable over there."
"What's their significance?"
"We need them to drink out of.

The young detective possessed that peculiar ability more common to elderly men, which produces negative energy around electrical equipment, turning even the most basic appliances into weapons of destruction.

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter.

No more sending your clothes over to forensics to be dry-cleaned, no more running up kebab tabs on stakeouts and no more pawning items from the Evidence Room until payday.

The traffic system needs a complete rethink," mused Bryant as the unit's only allocated vehicle, a powder-blue Vauxhall with a thoroughly thrashed engine, accelerated through Belsize Park. "Look at these road signs. Ministerial graffiti."
"It's no use lecturing on the problem, Arthur. That's why your driving examiner failed you thirty-seven times."
"What makes you such a great driver?'
"I don't hit things.

Look at the photographs of Hitler at Nuremberg two years ago, the deadness behind the eyes that denies humanity, just as it betrays the true darkness of the soul.' May

Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that's not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?

Three deaths - by snakebite, by explosion, by razor. What next? Death by hot air balloon? Cannon? Trident?

Old age should burn and rave at close of day.

I didn't bother with television myself because it consisted largely of windmills, puppets and pottery wheels, interspersed with elderly men smoking pipes while they discussed Harold Macmillan in Old Etonian accents.

War changes that. Crimes start to happen without reason, because people are upset, or angry, or just frustrated. Acts of violence are squalid, casual, mundane. Contrition, misery, fingerprints everywhere, children in tears.

Leave the thought, it will surface when it's ready

Look at this fog. The damp gets right into your bones. It's doing my chest no good at all. I'll need a vapour bath." Bryant pulled down his scarf and peered over the sodden hedge. Dew had formed on his bald head and ears. He resembled a minor Tolkien character.
"You're getting old before your time," warned May. "I can't imagine what you'll look like in your eighties."
"I'm ageing gracefully, which means not trying to look like a member of Concrete Blimp."
"I assume you mean Led Zeppelin ...

The drawings are terribly good.

She had a smile that could put a froth on a cup of coffee, and she knew it.

We're the police, we don't thump people.

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Reality TV has blown away the need for a roster of familiar faces in films. Plus, films became franchise and didn't need stars. But the real difference between stars and celebrities is that stars have training and talent, and celebrities just have exposure.

He kept his shirt-tail hanging out below the hem of his jacket as a white flag to motorists; over four thousand people had been killed in blackout accidents during the first few months of the war. It was safer to take an overseas posting with the British Expeditionary Force.

I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy

I'm not working class anymore,' he said. 'I'm lower-middle. I use three types of oil in my kitchen. Admittedly one of them is WD-40, but that counts, doesn't it?

Too many new writers dress up old cliches.

Tremble had a secret. Underneath his dreary exterior, he was quite interesting. When his penchant for investigating the area's past was indulged, a light shown in his eyes and he became almost passionate, which is why his wife kept a stack of local history books on her bedside table.

You see? This is what's wrong with the world. A young lady with bleached hair, an estuarine accent and unfeasible breasts can outsell a respected expert with decades of wisdom and experience."
"She's human interest," replied May.. "You're not. People reading her story will feel that if she can make it without talent, maybe they can.

Bryant wanted to be outside digging up corpses and chasing (as much as his bad leg would allow) unscrupulous but fiendishly brilliant villains through the back alleys of the city. Instead he was meeting a clerk about forgotten bits of paperwork.

The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.

Life is a very beautiful dream. I'm so glad I chose not to wake up from it just yet

Like all dancers, so much of her body fat had been converted to muscle that she needed to eat regularly.

The first one, his first sight of a dead body. That had changed everything. A fall from innocence, and the start of a lifelong fascination with violent crime.

The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.

I have to go, I'm being asked to join a conga line through the Byzantine reliquaries.

[Believers] have joy and comfort-that joy that angels cannot give, and devils cannot take.

My life was never intended to be one long slow descent into respectability.

I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency.

Do you enjoy reading?' 'I enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey.' Bryant quailed at the thought. 'That's not really reading, is it? More like staring at an assortment of words.' 'It is very popular.' 'So is taking photographs of your dinner for Facebook, but that doesn't mean it adds to the total sum of human knowledge.

What humanity wants most is crude sensation.
Really? I thought what humanity wanted most was dignity.

If the killer had really wanted to keep his victim's provenance hidden, he would have taken the head far away, or simply weighted it and thrown it into the fast-flowing tide of the Thames. The invention of the garbage bag had been a boon to murderers everywhere.

I don't think you should make so many off-colour jokes about him becoming a cuckold. You're only getting away with it because he doesn't know what it means.' 'That's the beauty of the English language. One can wrap insults inside elegance, like popping anchovies into pastry.

Second hand bookshops are best visited alone and in the rain.

There are always regrets, of course. But you have to try and make a difference without hurting anyone along the way, so that you can reach a final state of grace without shame.

His bedroom was a reflection of Bryant's mind, its untidy shelves filled with games and puzzles stacked in ancient boxes, statues and mementoes competing for space with books on every subject imaginable, from Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology to Illustrated British Ballads and A History of Indian Philosophy.
"What are you reading at the moment?' asked May.
"Batman," said Bryant. "The drawings are terribly good.

Big fucking mistake man. You can't be near her. Don't you get it? [ ... ] She's part of this city. Do you see? I mean, really part of it. You hurt her, you - hurt all of this.

For me, imagination would always provide a means of escape.

Whenever the cadaverous Home Office security supervisor became involved in their affairs, babies cried, women cowered, innocence was punished and blame was wrongly apportioned.

It was a violent place in which to discover a purpose. It was a good place to forge a friendship.

By the time I reached the sixth form at my local grammar school, my father would glower at me every time I passed him with a stack of books under my arm, warning me there was no money to go to university.

May walked slowly around the body, studying it. Putrefaction had been halted in its advance, but the corpse's skin had turned green and black, producing an acrid odour. He found it hard to imagine that this man had recently been walking around, eating in restaurants, watching TV. He was someone's lover, someone's son, but there was almost nothing human left. Without a head his trunk bore an unsettling similarity to something you would find in a meat locker. How would his loved ones feel if they could see him like this? 'Get anything else?' 'It's tricky because the usual decay process has been interrupted by the relatively sterile storage of the body. Usually, after two to three days you get staining on the abdomen. The discolouration spreads, veins grow dark, the skin blisters after a week, tissue starts softening and nails fall off at around the three-week stage, and finally the face becomes unrecognisable as the skin liquefies -