Quotes from Colin Bateman

Bookselling is like prostitution, you sell your wares, you close your eyes, and you never fall in love with the clients. You also keep your fingers crossed that they won't ask for anything perverted.

If you dwell in the darkness, you can see in the dark and look into the light. But in choosing the darkness, you know you are destined to walk alone.

I then swept the crumbs into my palm and opened one of the empty drawers and poured them in. I was working on the theory that if I collected enough crumbs, eventually I could make my own Twix. It's good to have a purpose in life.

He was the type of man women said they hated, they absolutely hated, they absolutely and categorically hated, and then they went to bed with him. I was the type of man women said they hated, and then they went home.

Serial Killer Week got off to an inauspicious start when the opening wine and bean evening was invaded by a former prisoner who misinterpreted the poster, but he was at least able to give us the professional's view of the genre.

They asked me how I would be paying and I told them that if past experience was anything to go by probably with my life and the thin girl with the thick spectacles reached deep into her soul for a smile and repeated the question.

And nobody has ever gotten emotional over a James Patterson novel.

He had started out the way nearly all writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times--amateurs transformed into gibbering wrecks by actually being published; what once they'd done for fun ruined forever by the burden of expectation, the hope of sales and good reviews and riches, hobbyists turned authors made bitter by the knowledge that they'd missed their main chance.

Also, I have a mornid fear of rates, and mice, and nettles and wasps and jagged cans and rotting food and damp newspapers and the unemployed.

Life is too short to spend an hour and a half on a mystery that will ultimately be solved by a cat.

They are way too happy.

Alison was snoring gently, and I was thinking about what would happen if I pinched her nose. And covered her mouth. The head is so full of holes, and the ear, nose and throat are supposedly connected; you would wonder why it isn't possible to breathe through your ears.

Coffee is coffee to me, I don't mind what country it comes from, who picks it or under what conditions, and I really don't give a damn who serves it or what they're getting paid as long as they get it right.

Books are precious things, and cannot be selected like tinned peas in Tesco.

You need your thumbs. They are one reason cats can't make omelettes.

Having to say 'so and so can't be with us tonight, but I would like to accept this murder charge on his behalf' would have been rather anticlimactic.

I could have volunteered everything I had discovered during the course of The Case of the Dancing Jews at any point during the eight hours he kept me in a cold police cell without access to a lawyer or Twix...

Anything with the word 'Tesco' or 'Weight Watchers' on the label should be viewed with some suspicion.

But it was a shouldn't with a hint of should.

It was teenage partying on adult paycheques.

Two big bottles of this and you wake up in the morning with a pile of vomit in your slippers and six hours pregnant.

We compromised on my withdrawal. I didn't. We British don't withdraw from Ireland.