Quotes from Adrian McKinty

I stuck on the lunchtime news. More riots. Tedious now. Depressing. You ever read Thucycdides? I'll boil him down for you in one easy moral: intergenerational war is a very bad thing.

Kate and Kendrick were those rare English bureaucrats who lived in the future not the past, something that no one in Ireland ever did.

I'd met spooks and blades and they lied like they had invented the concept.

The most important thing is that The Chain itself continues. Some of the people on it will be richer than others, but more crucial than their wealth is the fact that they have to be clever and discreet enough to add another link and keep the whole thing going. Each individual link in The Chain is precious.

I'm not down with the kids, though, am I? And you still haven't answered my question. What's an SEP?" "Someone else's problem, Sean," Matty said, with a heavy and significant sigh.

I know what you're thinking; you're thinking: it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances. Well you're not the Mikado and I'm not Mr Gilbert.

Don't trust whitey and whitey is fucking everywhere. We walked

A tradition is a living argument. A living argument for a practice that began a long time ago.

Bad prose is the bugbear of genre fiction.

encouraging nod of the head. Through the gigantic glass windows

Un plan prost executat la timp este mai bun decât un plan genial pus în practic? prea târziu.

He puts on Sam Cooke's Night Beat.

Sodium filament and neon. Interstate 95 at midnight. America's spinal cord, splicing lifelines and destinies and unrelated narratives.

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.

Our daughter's name Arwynn comes from Arwen in 'Lord of the Rings' because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.

On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located.

I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover.

I find it easier to write in the winter in Melbourne. When the weather is good you want to go out for a walk, ride a bike, go to a cafe or something. When it's raining, when it's a miserable day, I just sit down at my desk and get some work done.

The winters in Denver are brutal; it snows from the end of October to April.

Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'

The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out.