Sophie Hannah Quotes

It would not have done Poirot any good whatever to state that his wishes were the precise opposite of hers in this respect. Nothing fascinated him more than the private passions of strangers he would probably never meet again.

I will be angry until my dying day, Mr Catchpool. Greater sinners persecuting lesser sinners in the name of morality - that's something worth raging about.

I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'

Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?

A loose tile; Poirot could not sleep in a room with such a thing.

She'd buy diamond-studded earplugs and go and lie on a beach in the Caribbean where the whining of jealous bastards wouldn't reach her.

My characters all have issues, but I don't see that as weird or abnormal because I think in real life there are very few bland, normal people.

It is the job of art to replace unhappy true stories with happier inventions.

He wondered how many new starts a person was entitled to, how many times one could say it was the other person's fault and truly believe it.

No, thanks,' said Sam, who had never understood why he often refused drinks he would have liked to accept.

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

Sometimes a gentle perambulation causes a new idea to rise to the surface of one's thoughts.

No one has been buried at Mill Road Cemetery in Cambridge, England, for many years, and so the place has a shady, overgrown magic about it.

There comes a point in most cases - and by no means only those in which Hercule Poirot has involved himself - when one starts to feel that it would be a greater comfort, and actually no less effective, to talk only to oneself and dispense with all attempts to communicate with the outside world.

We cannot help how we feel, but we can choose whether or not to act upon those feelings.

Crime fiction is a way of satisfying that nosy need to know.

There are very few well-adjusted people in my books. But I do think that's normal. Because everyone does have their issues and hang-ups.

Agatha Christie never wrote books that just started with a dead body, and a 'Let's find out who the murderer is', which is kind of mysterious but not that mysterious. She always started with, 'How can this thing be happening; isn't it strange?'

Try as I might, Agatha Christie is unique. The actual writing style can't be exactly the same, so instead of trying to replicate it exactly, the way I got around it was by inventing a new narrator.

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

I want my books to explore motives which make people think, 'Wow! Imagine the psychological state you'd have to be in for that to be your motive!' Whereas things like blackmail, jealousy - they're rational reasons for committing murder.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

Weak people always attack strong people - it's safer. It's weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Stong people can walk away - no repercussions, you see, if you attack a stong person.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.

A lot of women feel like they should be enjoying motherhood, they should be fulfilled and shouldn't be thinking, 'I wish I didn't have to do this.'

make decisions based on hope, not fear.

Its weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Strong people can walk away- no repercussions, you see, if you attack a strong person.

What they'd got was a fat, balding academic who bandied about the phrase "family annihilation", especially when there were cameras pointed at him, and mentioned the titles of books and articles he'd written to anyone who would listen; who blatantly thought he was the mutt's nuts, as Sellers had so aptly put it.

Alas, the human mind is a perverse, uncontrollable organ,

I thought to myself, 'No matter what happens from now on, even if my heart ends up in pieces, this makes it all worth it, this moment.

With me, even if my life depended on it, I wouldn't be able to cry. Not with somebody there. Because even if I'm talking about bad and upsetting things, if there is somebody else in the room, I am trying to entertain them. If there is somebody there, I am in performance mode. I can only cry if I am on my own.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

Lies were lethal, however honourable the intentions of the liar. They deprived people of the opportunity to know the basic facts of their own lives.

You can always, and easily, give somebody the gift of hope and faith, even in the midst of despair.

But we'll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we'll have each other

I'm not cut out to lug babies around!

It is hate that makes people kill, Mr Catchpool, not love. Never love. Please be rational.

No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It's the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.

He didn't subscribe to the view ... that spirituality was a fast track to happiness. He believed the opposite was true: spiritual people suffered more than most.

Cambridge is heaven, I am convinced it is the nicest place in the world to live. As you walk round, most people look incredibly bright, as if they are probably off to win a Nobel prize.

What you cannot imagine, you cannot fear.

My father, whose hobby was collecting secondhand cricket books, came back from a book fair one day with a copy of 'The Body In The Library.'

That's not me talking, it's your inner voice. I'd attempt the accent, only I don't speak low self-esteem. It's a language I've never needed to learn.

She was irritated, briefly, by the thought that she might be becoming more mature. Why should she become a better person when no one else did?

Simon would disapprove, in the way that people who lacked life experience always disapproved of others having adventures they had so far missed out on.

Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.

I've been alone with my thoughts for too long; I'm starting to feel unreal.

Too much self-esteem, thought Simon: the real curse of our age.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

One cannot do such harm to another and not wound one's own soul in the process.

Think about how hard, not to mention ineffective, it would be to stand up in public and say, 'I did something unforgiveable that only a scoundrel would do, yet I'm not a scoundrel and you must forgive me.' It sounds like a paradox, doesn't it? Well, it's one we must embrace if we are to make any progress as a species, because we all do the bad things that only bad people would do, as well as the good things that only good people would do, which is why we mustn't hold anything against one another. If we want better apologies, we need to be more forgiving - it's as simple as that.

Wall of lies?' Proust muttered. 'Is that the one that borders the orchard of obsession that contains the tree of lunacy?

Sometimes, convenience has the appearance of logic.

I always notice the dysfunctional dynamic of human relationships because most places where you encounter it, people are trying to pretend it isn't happening.

...nostalgic people yearn for the past for a good reason---because they missed it, they weren't fully there when they should have been, when it was the present.

I am actually incredibly contented and jolly. But, and I have no idea why this is, I have a really strong empathy with all kinds of warped and destructive modes of thinking. I don't know why, but those things co-exist.

For me, a big part of writing psychological thrillers is choosing crimes committed for motives which would only apply to a particular person in a particular situation; a unique, one-off motive that is born out of someone's particular range of psychological afflictions.

The brilliant thing about swimming is that, while you're doing it, there's nothing else you could be getting on with, like the ironing or sorting out the children. My mind goes into free-float mode; some of the best ideas for plots come into my head while I'm ploughing up and down the pool.

Poirot smoothed his mustache, as if he imagined that laughing might have shaken it out of shape.

Are men like babies? Is trying to distract them a better tactic than asking them to behave reasonably?

Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It's all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn't want to be deep or highbrow.

If you only have one world, one life, then however brilliant it is most of the time, you have nowhere to run when you need to escape from it for a while.

If we knew more about psychology, we would be better equipped to deal with other people's psychological damage which they might project onto us.

No ramifications whatsoever. You're not going to ramificate; you don't know what it means. You don't know which of the words I use are real words and which I'm making up

You know how I feel about Occam's Razor. The simplest answer isn't usually the right one. Devious and unlikely is everywhere.' 'You ought to launch your own theory: Occam's Beard, you could call it.

Is Jason intelligent enough to realise that if you describe a thirty-eight-year-old woman as middle-aged, she's more likely to want to kill you than help you? Because Lauren isn't.

Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow.