Quotes from Harry Bingham

if it's cool you're after, then you're knock-knock-knocking on the wrong door. My maximum ambition is to make it to normal.

Accountants come in pairs these days. A middle-aged man in a dark suit and a sheen of perspiration, plus his younger accomplice, a woman who looks like her hobbies are arranging things in rows and making right angles.

People never really reinvent themselves. They migrate back to whatever they truly were.

It's no good living in a world at peace if your own head is at war with itself.

These are tears and I am crying. It is not a painful sensation, as I always thought it must be. It feels like the purest expression of feeling that it is possible to have. And the feeling mixes everything up together. Happiness. Sadness. Relief. Sorrow. Love. A mixture if things no psychiatrist ever felt. It is the most wonderful mixture in the world.

There are times when your body takes control. Times when the gazelle says, 'Fuck you, lioness,' and delivers the biggest kick of its whole gazelley life.

I like the structure of the crime story, but most of all I like the ecosystem in which the genre flourishes: the festivals, the websites, the fans, the fact that you have your own special section of the bookshop. And crime is cool, too. It's dark and edgy and funny and intelligent. I love it.

Never assume they know what you fear they know.

I'm not good with hospitals. The endless buildings, trees dotted around like apologies, and inside, it's job functions you can't understand and that air of incomprehensible busyness. Curtained-off beds and death settling like falling snow.

How do you conceal a secret? With openness.

living in the same house, married to the same woman, doing the same things in the same way until arthritis stiffened him, cataracts dimmed him, muscles failed and cancers ate him.

The harder you push at an unreliable memory, the less reliable it

You have the power . . . to consider time everlasting, to think of the swift change in the parts of each thing, of how brief is the span from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and the void beyond dissolution are equally infinite.

But to die – actually to die – that's an honour only ever granted to the living. The cost of admission.

Being constantly with other people places a pressure of normality on me that I can't always bear. Here, alone, I can be the way I am. My version of ordinary.

To have your face rolled down over your eyes and not even to notice your blindness. That's dead, I think, as dead as it's possible to be.

Mike has a theory that most calls are boring, so he often leaves his phone where he can't hear it.

When, finally, I go into the office, I experience that weirdness I always get when I've been away any length of time. Weirded out by the normality. The way life without me seems to have been much the same as life with me, only presumably more peaceful and with slightly worse grammar.

He looks sun-tanned. Real tanned, not the normal Welsh version, where an upper layer of skin might have taken a little colour, but the six layers beneath are still all white and scared and fragile.

Jackson fingers the gold, the jet, the horn, the glass, the iron. Then - because he is a man and a Welsh man at that, one for whom hitting things only ever lies a short half-step away from consciousness - he stands in my living room, sword in hand, feeling its heft.

it's an all-hands-on-deck affair.' 'And he wants my hand on his deck.' 'He does indeed.

It's worse than I'd thought. I'm not just in a horror movie, I'm a dwarf in a horror movie.

It takes Burnett only a moment to figure out what I'm talking about, but says, 'I'm on it. What's wrong with your voice?' 'I'm eating biscuits.' 'You're eating biscuits?' Burnett is obviously still a bit sleepy, since I couldn't have made myself much clearer. 'Yes, sir. I'm eating biscuits. Stolen chocolate digestives. Oh, also, we're going to need some ambulances.' 'Ambulances?' 'Sir, is this a new game where you repeat everything I say?

I avoid doing things on impulse, because I've learned that my feelings are too unreliable to trust.