Quotes from Anthony Horowitz

There's nothing to beat the full English,' Marc exclaimed. 'And don't you give me any of that continental rubbish. Yoghurt and croissant and that horrible concoction they call muesli. If you ask me, that's the best thing about getting out of the EU, and there's a long list where that's concerned.

The unsigned will is one of those tropes of detective fiction that I've come to dislike, only because it's so overused. In real life, a lot of people don't even bother to make a will but then we've all managed to persuade ourselves that we're going to live for ever. They certainly don't go round the place threatening to change it in order to give someone the perfect excuse to come and kill them. It looked as if Alan Conway had done exactly that.

Forget all the twiddly bits, Mr Bond. These superchargers! All they do is suck, squeeze, bang and blow. Who

that four hundred years of careful in-breeding should amount to nothing more.

As for myself, I felt nothing but pity for Marc Bellamy. I'd been through the private-education system myself – another version of the full English – and knew only too well how the casual cruelty and the pack mentality that he had described could stay with you for the rest of your life.

And then it would all be over. He would be gone.

I have had a long life and I will say that in many respects it has been a good one. I had expected to die on many occasions before now. You might even say that death has been a companion of mine, always walking two steps behind. Well, now he has caught up.

Well, you know, it's been one of those years." It always was, where Michael was concerned. He'd turned gloom into an art form.

It was almost like discovering that Enid Blyton, in her spare time, had turned to pornography.

There's something quite comforting about mess, especially when there's no one else there to complain.

being published. But I'd known Alan Conway for eleven years, or I thought I had, and I found it almost impossible to believe that he could have produced this, all four hundred and twenty pages of it. It was as if he was whispering to me as I lay there in the darkness, telling me something I didn't want to hear.

They had an open marriage. Sex was no big deal. I wouldn't be surprised if Charles didn't get off watching this. The two of them were as bad as each other.

free wine and food were worth having even if they had no idea who had actually died.

and it wasn't even as if he did anything to deserve it. He just inherited it from his father and his father before him. This is 1955, for heaven's sake. Not the Middle Ages! Of course, it doesn't help having the bloody Tories still in power but you'd have thought we'd have moved away from the days when people were given wealth and power simply because of an accident of birth.

wonderful and reassuring about the idea that in the rush of modern life people will still come together and sit for an hour in a theatre, a gymnasium or a giant tent simply out of a love of books and reading. There's a sort of innocence about

There's something about Oxford that has always appealed to authors and it seems to me that it has somehow seeped into their work. Think of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch and, more recently, Philip Pullman. It's hard to imagine them living anywhere else.

Internet gambling is a horrible thing,' Hawthorne went on, and for once he sounded genuinely sympathetic. 'Your son was one of around three hundred thousand addicts in the country. There are about five hundred deaths a year and most of them are young men, university students, kids living alone. And the big online gambling companies … they know what they're doing with those bright lights and flashing colours, the personalised texts and emails

I didn't sleep well that night. I'm used to bad writing. I've looked at plenty of novels that have no hope of being published. But I'd known Alan Conway for eleven years, or I thought I had, and I found it almost impossible to believe that he could have produced this, all four hundred and twenty pages of it. It was as if he was whispering to me as I lay there in the darkness, telling me something I didn't want to hear.

You must have been sickened when you got an invitation to a literary festival sponsored by Spin-the-wheel.com. I assume they were the same people who killed William.

You don't think he deserved it? Charles le Mesurier destroyed my son and made money out of his pain – and the pain of hundreds like him! Go on the website. Look at it.

The life went out of his eyes and it suddenly occurred to me that murderers are the loneliest people on the planet. It's the curse of Cain – the fugitive and the vagabond driven out from the face of the earth.

wanted him to know what it felt like … to gamble for his life,' Anne said. 'I left his hand free so that he could toss the coin. I told him to call and that if he got it right, I would let him go.

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness,' says Antonio in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a play I first saw at the RSC in 1971 with Judi Dench in the title role. But it's accepting that you will never achieve your ambition that can really drive you mad.

Literary festivals all over the country turn writers into performers and open doors into their private lives that, I often think, would be better left closed. In my view, it's more satisfying to learn about authors from the work they produce rather than the other way round.