Joseph Finder Quotes

I got a stone in my shoe, Mr. Corleone,' " I said, quoting from the third Godfather movie.

Often? That's a relative concept when you're in here." He licked his lips. They were chapped, startlingly red against the snow white of his Methuselah beard.

SHE FELT a hard pinch on her neck. "Hey!" she protested. Her eyelids flew open. The light was unbearably bright, just as painful, but everything was gauzy and indistinct, like there was a white scrim over everything. She wondered whether she'd fallen back asleep for several hours.

IF YOU took a really close look at some of the biggest, most notorious scandals of the last thirty or so years, you'd find Jay Stoddard lurking somewhere in the shadows. As an investigator or a fixer or an adviser, I mean. Whether it was the Iran-Contra hearings in the Reagan days or a Canadian media mogul on trial for fraud. Or one of a dozen Congressional sex scandals. And a whole lot more situations that might have exploded into ugly public imbroglios if it hadn't been for Stoddard's work.

But the reason that writers like Harlan and Lee don't outline is that they enjoy the serendipity, the surprises that arise when they're not constricted by the steel girdle of an outline. And I get that too. Some of the best plot twists in my work have been ones that I didn't plan on, including the ending to PARANOIA. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is living in the story so that you "experience" it the way your characters do.

It's better than the Green Line," Galvin said with a

Burris answered with an obscenity, and suddenly he lunged at me. I saw him move a split second too late. He slammed me against the side of a building, cracking my head hard against the brick. With his right hand, he clamped my throat just below the Adam's apple and pincered hard. He was strong, even stronger than I expected, and he put his whole overdeveloped body into it. At the same time, he pinioned my left arm with his right shoulder and grabbed my right hand, just above the wrist, and jammed his right knee into the inside of my leg. Now I knew for sure he'd really been a Navy SEAL. He was doing everything by the book. Which was good, actually.

The kid scared her sometimes, he was so smart. She wondered where he inherited it. Not from her gene pool, that was for sure. Richard, her first husband and Gabe's father, was smart enough but no genius. She also wondered from time to time whether being so precocious made him an outcast at his private boys' school. It couldn't be easy.

You said electronic lock. I didn't know it was a TL-30X6." "I don't like your tone, Merlin. You sound very pessimistic. Maybe even defeatist." "Heller, listen to me. I brought my StrongArm safe cracker diamond-core drill bits, okay? But drilling through one of these, that's a five-hour job at least. That mother's made from inch-and-a-half-thick steel and cobalt-carbide matrix hardplate, okay?" "If you say so.

There is nothing we fear so much as the unknown, and the Surgeon was not going to enlighten her.

What's your point?" He spun around in his chair and took a brown file folder from a wire rack on the credenza behind him next to a couple of generic office plants. He opened it, took out a sheet of paper, and looked at it for a moment. Then he handed it to me. It was a fax from a bank in the Caymans called Transatlantic Bank & Trust (Cayman) Limited, located on Mary Street in George Town, Grand Cayman. A copy of a copy of a copy, festooned with smudges and photocopier artifacts. It was a letter from Roger, on Gifford Industries letterhead, to the bank's manager. A letter of instruction.

But arguendo, as the lawyers say - just for the sake of argument - let's say my employees have been applying pressure on your brother's wife. Why would they do that if we'd taken Roger prisoner? Where's the sense in that?" "Because he left something behind, and you want it." "Now you're starting to make sense. You're half-right." "Am I?" "Absolutely. He does have something we want. That's absolutely true. But I doubt he left it behind. That doesn't fit with my understanding of your brother's character. Though maybe that's presumptuous. You know him far better than we do. Am I wrong to assume that he takes after your father?

Heller," he called after me. "I don't know what you have up your sleeve, but I suggest you not bother. Like Sun Tzu said: 'All battles are won or lost before they're fought.

We were wrapping up our Monday morning Risk Committee meeting, which was basically twelve of the firm's most senior staff members sitting around the big conference table and voting on which cases to take and which to turn down. It was your typical undercaffeinated Monday morning gathering: stifled yawns and low energy, throat-clearing and doodling, and furtive glances at BlackBerrys. Except for Jay, who paced around the room because he couldn't sit still for more than five minutes.

She rose as Leland came over to her desk and hugged her. He was tall and rotund, with arched bushy eyebrows and sagging jowls, a large head and rosy cheeks and a white crew cut. Those who met him for the first time found him physically intimidating, and indeed, in repose, he often wore an imperious expression, made even more threatening by his arched brows.

You make Gifford Industries sound like some sort of two-bit Mafia-owned New Jersey garbage-hauling company." I thought of a few rejoinders - I'm just wired that way - but I held my tongue.

The truth was, Roger and I hadn't been close since Dad's trial. Maybe that was a euphemistic way of putting it. I didn't like the guy, and he didn't like me either. We barely tolerated each other.

Did a few poor souls die because of the Big Dig? Son, a hundred men died building the Hoover Dam. A thousand men died building the Erie Canal. Four hundred Chinamen died building the transcontinental railroad. How about the Panama Canal? One of the greatest engineering feats in history? Thirty thousand men died building it. Ambitious projects always cost lives, son. That's the truth. Have you ever visited the great pyramids of Giza?

I had to assume, of course, that every word Koblenz had told me, including "and" and "the," was a lie. That was a given. But I operated on that assumption most of the time anyway: Washington, D.C., is to lying what Hershey, Pennsylvania, is to chocolate.

I would argue that coffee has been far more important to literature than alcohol.

Challenge is tough. It needs efforts, energy and time.

I can't tell you that, sir." The woman's voice had gone from bored-but-friendly to officious-and-stern.

The man was remarkably . . . well, homely. Ugly, not to put too fine a point on it. His face was deeply pitted with scars, obviously the victim of a terrible case of adolescent acne. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had thinning brown hair, round shoulders, a pigeon chest.

Here's the thing about close combat in real life: It's almost always over in a matter of seconds. Not like in the movies, where your hero has the luxury to strategize and maneuver and grapple for minutes on end. Fortunately, when your life is in danger, your brain kicks in. Deep inside your brain this little almond-shaped gland called the amygdala sends out the signal to make your body start pumping out dopamine and adrenaline and cortisol. Time seems to slow, your focus sharpens, you suddenly start perceiving way more stimuli than normal. Neurologists call this tachypsychia. Everyone else calls it the fight-or-flight response. Cavemen who didn't have it got eaten by saber-toothed tigers. So I made a quick decision. I could either be incapacitated by a Taser, or I could put myself within the reach of Bondarchuk's fists. No choice.

He glanced at me, then chuckled. "Sprezzatura's an Italian word. Means the art of making something difficult look easy.

The pitch we used to convince companies to spend $50 million bucks for one of our planes was that it wasn't simply a means of transportation; oh no - it was 'a productivity tool'. It allowed an executive to make good use of his travel time and a relaxed and refreshed executive could seal the deal much more effectively than his travel-worn counterpart. Yeah, right. You can always justify any obscene luxury on the grounds of productivity...

He was convinced this was a bribe, a kickback, to some Pentagon big shot, and he wanted proof. But that was a tall order, even to someone as brilliant as your brother. It's a little like understanding algebraic combinatorics if you still don't get long division.

As far as I could see, there weren't any fiber-optic sensors buried in the ground next to the perimeter fence. That would have been outrageously costly. Unnecessary, too. Instead, the facility was protected by a twelve-foot chain-link fence, six-gauge galvanized steel - extremely difficult to cut through - and topped by coils of razor wire.

Then I reached the second building and saw the conflagration. A bonfire twenty feet high. The wreck of a Hummer, its carcass barely visible behind the veil of flame.

As the saying goes not every conspiracy is a theory.

What does that look like to you?" he said. "A forgery." He shrugged, snorted quietly. "That's right, Heller. We have teams of forgers at work creating phony documents just for you." His sarcasm was subtle. "Now do you see? Starting to recognize your brother's modus operandi? Steal a bunch of money, then, when you realize that you've messed with the wrong guys, do the cowardly thing and run? Wonder where he got that from." "Screw you." I no longer felt bad about making up that story about his cigars. "Oh, believe me, it's the truth. Maybe to Victor Heller's sons that's nothing more than loose change you find under your sofa cushions. But not to me. And certainly not to Allen Granger.

Ms. Heller," said the man, "if you can hear me, say something, will you?" "What do you want, I'm shouting!" Lauren said at the top of her voice. "Now I see it," one of the female voices said. "Like she's trying to talk. I don't know what she said." "I think she said 'Ow.