Quotes from Robert Galbraith

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.

Robin was disposed to feel desperately sorry for anyone with a less fortunate love life than her own – if desperate pity could describe the exquisite pleasure she actually felt at the thought of her own comparative paradise.

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings—feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous—to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

Hell's built on regret.

In essence, we tend to sort each other and ourselves into groupings, and that usually leads to an overestimation of similarities between members of a group, and an underestimation of the similarities between insiders and outsiders.

Such is the universal desire for fame that those who achieve it accidentally or unwillingly will wait in vain for pity.

I was only going to say that abused people cling to their abusers, don't they? They've been brainwashed to believe there's no alternative." I was the bloody alternative, standing there, right in front of her!

Strike had never wanted children; it was one of the things on which he and Charlotte had always agreed, and it had been one of the reasons other relationships over the years had foundered. Lucy deplored his attitude, and the reasons he gave for it; she was always miffed when he stated life aims that differed from hers, as though he were attacking her decisions and choices.

I'm totally serious. Look it up on the net. When women turn, they really turn.

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen. Henrik Ibsen,

Instinct was clawing at him like an importuning dog.

He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks....

she'd seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn't mere friendship, and they'd hugged, and she'd felt . . . Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she'd imagined him saying 'come with me' and known she'd have gone if he had.

I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don't retract a word. That is a fact.

You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it,

Clues from chaos, sense from madness.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.

Strike had not been able to guard against warm feelings for Robin, who had stuck by him when he was at his lowest ebb and helped him turn his fortunes around; nor, having normal eyesight, could he escape the fact that she was a very good-looking woman.

She thought it might be the very first time that Strike had ever given any indication that he saw her as a woman, and she silently filed away the exchange to pore over later, in solitude.

Happy birthday, this isn't your real present, you'll get that later. (Not flowers) Love Strike x

He experienced one of those moments of simultaneous confusion and clarity that belong to the drunk and the desperate.

I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.

Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.

He's the turd that won't flush," as Strike put it to Lucy,