Quotes from Anthony Horowitz

pointing the way ahead and throwing pure, white light on to his immediate surroundings. Alex was at the start of a long tunnel

Oh, and since the state received a thousand dollars in federal funds for every child taken into custody, it was a nice little earner

Diana Cowper had planned her funeral and she was going to need it. She was murdered about six hours later that same day.

But such gossip cannot be confronted. Rumours and malicious gossip are like bindweed. They cannot be cut back, even with the sword of truth. I can, however, offer you this comfort. Given time, they will wither and die of their own volition.

and fish dripping blood

I took the train to New York and it is hard to convey to you my first impressions as I left Grand Central Depot. I found myself in a city of extraordinary opulence and abject poverty, of astonishing elegance and extreme depravity, the two living so close by that I only had to turn my head to pass from one to the other.

know you're only doing your job, Mr Hawthorne, and you don't really care how you get your results. I was there when you were giving your talk and it struck me then that you have absolutely no heart at all. You don't believe in the law.

Swear words in books have always struck me as lazy and over-familiar. But the 'c' word is more than that. It's used by sour, frustrated men, nearly always about women. It's a word full of misogyny – crudely offensive.

I hurried forward and entered the church. The interior was huge, cluttered, draughty, a collage of different centuries. It was probably unhappy to have arrived at this one: the twelfth century had provided the arches, the sixteenth the lovely wooden ceiling, the eighteenth the altar – and what had the twenty-first bestowed upon St Michael? Atheism and indifference.

I was with him throughout the whole process: writing the books, finishing them and then the horrible disappointment when nobody was interested. You have no idea what it's like, Susan, being rejected, those letters that turn up in the post with six or seven lines dismissing the work of a whole year.

he waited for one load of passengers to get off and another to get on, he would never see the

One car behind him. Two

Well, I'm investigating a murder and now a woman has gone missing, so I wasn't exactly waiting for an invitation,' Hawthorne replied.

As far as I'm concerned, you can't beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn't seen it from the start.

But if there was one thing that life had taught him, it was the futility of making plans. Life had its own agenda.

everything in life had a pattern and that a coincidence was simply the moment when that pattern became briefly visible.

Like many wealthy Americans, he was imbued with a sense of civic responsibility

Have we killed everyone who needs killing?

Fraser had the immediate thought that his was a man whom it would be easy to dislike. He did not just arouse antipathy; he almost seemed to cultivate it.

It was the week before my sixteenth birthday when the boy fell out of the door. Is that a good start?

Alex felt the bullets pass over his shoulder and heard a scream as one of the other guards was hit. Well, that made one less anyway!

It's one of the paradoxes of being a writer that, physically, there's not a huge difference between the debut novelist and the international best-seller: they're each stuck in a room with a laptop, too many Jaffa Cakes and nobody to talk to. I once worked

On some nights I take a little laudanum and a few months ago Mrs Abernetty recommended pillows stuffed with camel hair. She was absolutely right.

He had an extraordinary presence that could be saturnine, threatening or magnetic, depending on his mood.