Terry Hayes Quotes

Like people say - if you want to make God laugh, tell him you've got plans.

They say that when men are dying in battle their fingers nearly always twist into the soil, trying to hold on to the earth and all the pain and love it holds. The

I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. There was only one thing to recommend it: say, you wanted to commit suicide and couldn't quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick.

would have seen a man with empty eye sockets,

You wanted to commit suicide and couldn't quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick. With no movie houses, concerts, bars, mixed-sex coffee shops, or parties there was little to do at night and we drove down a highway that was almost deserted.

The natural milieu I inhabit is more in epic storytelling.

The interior of the arms dealer's private jet was so ugly it hurt my feelings as well as my eyeballs.

The three agents were hard guys, the youngest of them in his twenties, a man whose IQ was so low I figured they had to water him twice a day.

The complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale floristry business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized.

I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and handsaws would have once been the most highly paid members of their community and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders.

There was this book I'd read by somebody whose name I couldn't remember and he had this expression 'sorrow floats

long view of the drive and gave that week's

As a Swiss writer once said, "We wanted a labor force but human beings came," and what nobody had foreseen was that those workers would bring their mosques, their holy book, and huge swathes of their culture with them.

He was in his midforties, tall and overweight, a sausage-fingered vulgarian in a slick suit.

enjoy - the on-site health care,

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty.

Things that cross all racial, religious, and cultural boundaries - poor

Locard's Exchange Principle and it says "every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.

A child who had been introduced to misery in Saudi Arabia, a teenager who went to wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a deeply devout Muslim who had graduated with honors in medicine, a man who had fed a stranger to wild dogs in Damascus, a zealot who had dosed three foreigners with smallpox and watched them die in agony, gave thanks to Allah for the blessings that had been bestowed upon him.

You gonna curse the darkness or light a candle?

A couple of days ago, I saw a rig big enough to haul that tanker. You wanna get outta here? You talk to me.

I was angry about injustice
about the uncaring way the world works. I knew a lot of ordinary people had died that day, not because of fire or falling masonry but because of their compassion. It was their desperate attempts to save other human being
often total strangers
that ended up costing them their own lives.

Yet again that the quietest man in the room is usually the most dangerous.

I have nothing but praise for J. K. Rowling. Her contribution - apart from the books themselves, obviously - is showing writers how to interact with the 21st Century.

If the shit is up to your neck - whatever you do, don't make waves.

With bee-stung lips and bolt-on boobs,

There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he'd learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you - just listen to them.

I was so engrossed by the idea that it took me a moment to register that the drivers behind were laying on their horns and I had a green. I hit the gas, rummaged one-handed through the files Cumali had given me, found a note to the medical examiner with her mobile number attached to it, and pulled out my cell phone. I was halfway through dialing when I realized that a woman with a six-year-old child might not appreciate being woken, and, anyway, what was she going to do that late at night?

Movies are a team sport now, and I want to play singles.

You can kill a thinker, but you can't kill the thought.

I have heard people say love is weak but they're wrong
love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things
patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love
the epic and the small, the noble and the base
the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all.

Every life leaves a trace, every ship a wake, and even though it was often just a glimmer of phosphorescence in the dark,

The driver thought I was crazy - but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.

I've heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They've been burning books, Dave - the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I've been listening to them." "And you don't think we have - the people in Washington?" He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know. "Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut." He turned and looked out the window. It was starting to rain. He was quiet for a long time and I began to wonder if his blood pressure had taken off again. "I think you're right," he said at last. "I think, like the Jews, we believed in the fundamental goodness of men; we never thought it could really happen.

After all, education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.

On a deeper level, I think many stories - especially thrillers - can be a journey to the heart of darkness.

To view, I had started for the first time in my adult life to live in a world without secrets. I looked at all the laughing women, hips swinging, sashaying down the wide boulevards of Paris, and as spring became summer I started to believe anything was possible. The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign, you can never leave. I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge it then, but too much wreckage floats in the wake of a life like mine - people you've hurt don't forget. And at the back of your mind is the

a man gets burnt out long before his reputation.

Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return.

The last vestiges of consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder, all she ever was and hoped to be is gone.

People say love is weak, but they're wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things - patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And every kind of love - the epic and the small, the noble and the base - the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I'll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything.

Go down deep enough into darkness and nothing's ever the same,

Movie studios could learn a thing or two from British publishers. There is an intelligence, and a respect for writers; things that you hope for and never get in Hollywood.

for cleanliness, that's a dirty

If Only
but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can't rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good.

Within hours, large crowds were streaming into the car park and by the time a twelve-year-old boy - the Saracen's best friend - drove past with his father he knew exactly what it meant. It was a Friday - the Muslim day of rest - and the traffic was terrible, so it took the kid over an hour to get home. He immediately grabbed his bicycle and rode eight miles to tell his friend what he had seen.

I used to be a journalist.

That was the part of the epic story about coming back from the dead, being restored to life. "He is risen," it says. He is risen.

If you take the final betrayal out of it,' he said, 'he was a fine agent - one of the best.'
I stared at him. 'That's one way of putting it,' I replied. 'If you take the bomb out of it, 6 August was probably a nice day in Hiroshima.

We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.