Mo Hayder Quotes

I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.

I'm a post-menopausal woman who's lived in a man's world for twenty years. A more cynical, cruel creature it's hard to find.

I noticed that in Tokyo people didn't smell. It was funny. I couldn't smell them, and they didn't say very much: the trains were packed but it was quite silent, like being jammed into a carriage with a thousand shop-window mannequins.

Wine?" said Zoe. "At two in the afternoon?"

"I've decided to become an alcoholic. Just for the duration of my middle years." She filled a glass and rested it on the edge of the washbasin. "That's yours.

I hooked the condom out with the end of a spoon and dropped it into the bottom of a white bin-bag, where it lay, dried out and brown, as transparent as old human skin.

Maybe that was the price of ignorance, I thought, looking at the naked vagrant. Maybe Japan had to pay for the ignorant things it did in Nanking. Because ignorance as I'd got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.

In most crime novels the violent act, usually the murder, is the engine. Take that away and there is little left to drive the story along. So I do get a little cross with authors who aren't precise about the violence they're using to create tension because I feel they're being dishonest with their readers. If people don't like the blood and violence in my books, fine, they can always close the cover and put it aside and maybe read a romance instead. – Mo Hayder