Jeffery Deaver Quotes

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Playing chess or Go or Tigris and Euphrates - a very good game, by the way - I can watch people as they choose their strategy and note how they respond to something I've done. Even

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

Every case I worked is closed. All the principals were either abducted and resettled . . . or zeroed," she said, using a verb that I'd heard from time to time if my principal was in a similar line of work. It had become popular among the Mossad. They liked to use shorthand they thought was American. Zero

What'd he do? Your stepfather?

Islands - of times when you're content, you don't think about the loss. Now it's like your world's underwater. All of it. But the water goes down and the islands come up. The water'll be there always but you'll find dry land

The human creature is so astonishing, but count on it before anything else to be just that-a creature. A laughing animal, a dangerous one, a clever one, a scared one, but always acting for a reason-a motive that will move the beast towards its desires.

As a matter of fact, yeah, they were foolproof. The problem is that you don't have to protect yourself against fools. You have to protect yourself against people like me.

Hollow then produced Kobel's tax returns for the past three years.
When Ringling objected, Hollow said to Judge Rollins, "Your Honor, a man who files a tax return is of sound mind."
"That's debatable," said the ultraconservative judge, drawing laughter from the courtroom.

This only is denied the Gods: the power to remake the past. - ARISTOTLE

People with children and people with their own business always pick up a ringing phone.

Six Seconds is a great read. Echoing Ludlum and Forsythe, author Mofina has penned a big, solid international thriller that grabs your gut
and your heart
in the opening scenes and never lets go.

That's the past for you. Not only does it come back at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, times but it's set in stone.

In a matter-of-fact voice, she said to me, "Have you found out anything more than that?" She glanced toward the documents, which said nothing directly about her job. "Only that you were with the Sickle project. My associate's good but she couldn't get much more than that. Your archives're locked pretty tight. As for active files - if the group is still active . . ." She said nothing. "If it's still active, she didn't find anything on record." Though the nickname of the group was anglicized to the name of the farm implement, in fact it came from the Israeli Defense Force's name for assassination - in Hebrew, sikul memukad, which means "focused foiling.

You see tumbleweeds? You see cowpokes? Indians? This isn't the streets of Laredo.

She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.

His rules were unencumbered by my constraints - the Constitution and the laws promulgated thereunder. Still,

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.

A young officer in my organization, Lyle Ahmad, was a solid, olive-skinned former marine with a trim crew cut. He was a clone, a close protection officer. I had met Ahmad when he was a marine guarding the U.S. embassy in Warsaw and I was an agent with the State Department's protection and investigation arm, Diplomatic Security, where I worked before joining my present outfit. He was quiet and sharp and boasted impressive multiple-language skills. He was a rising star in our organization. Driving

Doctor, do you read the Harry Potter books?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have."
"The fourth was my favorite. What was yours?"
"Umm, I don't know really."
"Is it possible," the prosecutor asked the witness, "that those writings of Mr. Kobel are merely attempts at writing a novel? Some big fantasy book."
"I…I can't imagine it."
"But it's possible, isn't it?"
"I suppose. But I'll tell you, he'll never sell the movie rights.

Always thinking. This was one of the reasons he loved her.

Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.

People want to avoid the past. I suppose that's natural. When we tally up all we've said and done over the years, despite the wonderful memories, the regrets may be fewer but stand out more prominently, glowing coals that we can never quite extinguish, try though we might

And if it took awhile, that means she was in pain for a long time.

What brilliant criminals the Leader and his crowd are. They kidnap the nation by seizing our children.

From The Garden of Beasts.

I liked old time music but what i meant by that was the period from the 1930s through the 60s, nothing before and little after.
Performers like fats waller, Sinatra, billie holiday, louis armstrong, rosemary clooney, ella, sammy Davis Jr, dean martin ... If the lyrics weren't stupid. Words were important.

I write pretty much anywhere - on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

Stanton clawed his way to the bedside table and managed to grab his knife. He jabbed it into Rhyme. Once, twice. But the only places he could reach were the criminalist's legs and arms. It's pain that incapacitates and pain was one thing to which Lincoln Rhyme was immune.

The workbench was filled with glassware, books, syringes, tattooing machine parts, plastic bags, tools. Dozens of books on toxins and thousands of downloaded Internet documents,

The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire.

The best part about Omar was that he wasn't simply a decoy. Surrounding the robot was a grid of ultraviolet and microwave beams. When Loving or his partner, presumably from some distance, took up position and fired the typical three-burst round into Omar's head, empty and inexpensively replaceable, a computer would instantly correlate trajectory, speed and GPS coordinates and indicate on our handhelds where the shooter was, down to three feet. Would

I was satisfied that it would be virtually impossible for Loving to find any connection. "Call him." I handed Ryan a mobile, a flip phone, black, a little larger than your standard Nokia or Samsung. "What's this?" "A cold phone. Encrypted and routed through proxies. From now on, until I tell you otherwise, use only this phone." I collected theirs and took out the batteries. Ryan

Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, / He who travels fastest who travels alone...

He believed there was nothing essentially unAmerican about greed or lust - hey, those qualities were encouraged everywhere from Wall Street to Capitol Hill.

Sometimes you can't be what you ought to be, you can't have what you ought to have.

as old as we may be in flesh, we are always young in the bone

little too undistinguished, a little

The seat of power in the twenty-first century is information, not oil or geography.

A few were journalists and one a novelist, who wanted to get it right. (Rhyme welcomed his presence; he himself was the subject of a series of novels based on cases he'd run and had written the author on several occasions about misrepresentations of real crime scene work. "Must you sensationalize?")

Robert Rotenberg does for Toronto what Ian Rankin does for Edinburgh.

Even souvenir seekers. One of the worst contaminants was fellow officers, especially brass grandstanding if reporters were present and eager to grab a video bite to slap on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. One more glance at the circular coffin. Okay, Amelia Sachs thought: Knuckle time ... A phrase of her father's. The man had also been cop, a beat patrolman working the Deuce - Midtown South; back then Times Square was like Deadwood in the 1800s. "Knuckle time" referred to those moments when you have to go up against your worst fears. Breadbasket ... Sachs returned to the access door and climbed through it and down into the utility room below the cellar. Then she took the evidence collection gear bag from the other officer. Sachs said, "You search the basement, Jean?" "I'll do it now," Eagleston said. "And then get everything into the RRV." They'd done a fast examination of the cellar. But it was apparent that the perp had spent minimal time there. He'd grabbed Chloe, subdued

didn't seem to be the nickname sort. Beautiful people rarely were. 'Let's

We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets - and oh how we squander those moments.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should've seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if metallurgy report wasn't in your hands ASAP there'd be one mean mother - you get the picture - reaming their - you get the rest of the picture.

Breathtakingly real and utterly compelling, Immoral dishes up page-turning psychological suspense while treating us lucky readers to some of the most literate and stylish writing you'll find anywhere today.

God don't give out certain.

When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is as much bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process. But

Love, son, is not manifest in the gift of gadgets or coddling foods or rooms of one's own. Love shows itself in discipline and example and sacrifice - even giving up one's life.

Too much screaming in Congress. Too much screaming everywhere.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

Curiously, while drone operators are perhaps the safest of all combat troops physically, they have among the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress in the military and national security services. Sitting at a video console in Colorado or New York City, killing someone six thousand miles away and then collecting the kids at gymnastics or football practice, having dinner and sitting down to watch Dancing with the Stars in your suburban den was disorienting beyond belief.

The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law.

Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.

And life changes. Maybe just a little, maybe a lot. And at some point, it just isn't worth the fight to fix it.

For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

I like watches from that era. Back then a watch was power. Not many people could afford one. The owner of a watch was a man who controlled time ... chains and fobs were invented so that even when a man carried a watch in his pocket, you could still see he owned one

I'm really not the cold fish everyone thinks I am.

Time transcends morality

Everything in the past is memory and everything in the future is imagination. Those're both illusions – memories are unreliable and we just speculate about the future. The only thing that's completely real is this one instant of the present – and that's constantly changing from imagination to memory. So, see? Most of our life's illusory.

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

In my twenties I was in Austin, Texas, finishing up yet another degree. I'd always loved hiking and, sick of the sedentary life of academia, I'd joined the orienteering club at the university. The sport, which originated in Sweden, is a competition in which you use a special map and a compass to navigate through wilderness you've never seen before, stopping at checkpoints to have a control card physically or electronically stamped. The first competitor to hit the "double circle" - the end of the route on the orienteering map - is the winner. I

Somebody you busted?" Amanda asked matter-of-factly.

In the shaded portions where the two spheres of different lives meet, certain fundamentals- moods, loves, fears, angers- can't be hidden. That's the contract.

They look like wounds, not tattoos.

I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book.

William Gibson's novel Neuromancer,

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

eager' and 'anxious' aren't the same, or how 'disinterested' doesn't mean 'uninterested.

Because of her frenetic nature and dancing mind, she chatted up a storm with the subjects she interviewed, who ended up overwhelmed or intimidated. Or captivated.

It's a tough life, she'd said. "It's the little things that get us through the day.

But it works that way if it works.

Rhyme's eyes closed. His head dipped. But only a few millimeters. As with most great men, Lincoln Rhyme's gestures of defeat were very subtle.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

The greatest single threat to an investigator is unfamiliarity with his environment.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

Criminalistics doesn't exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply- (This quote was never completed in the book because Rhyme stopped abruptly at the end of it. I really wish he had finished his thought.)

Pulaski said, "Even psycho killers need to do home repairs. Probably it's not related to the case.

I'm thinking about it," she mused, almost to herself. "The building burned. . . . There was a DNA match. I recall the report. There were some typos in it, remember?" Claire duBois was older than her adolescent intonation suggested, though not much. Short brunette hair, a heart-shaped and delicately pretty face, a figure that was probably very nice - and I was as curious about it as any man would be - but usually hidden by functional pantsuits, which I preferred her wearing over skirts