Quotes from Jeff Lindsay

The mind picks some very bad times to take a walk doesn't it?

I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was suffocating.

Another beautiful Miami day. Mutilated corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. I got dressed and went to work.

I'm quite sure more people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake all of it." --Dexter

What to wear? I could think of no guidelines on what we were wearing this season to a party forced on you to celebrate an unwanted engagement that might turn into a violent confrontation with a vengeful maniac. Clearly brown shoes were out, but beyond that nothing really seemed de rigueur.

After a long moment I closed the freezer door. I wanted to lie down and press my cheek against the cool linoleum. Instead I reached out with my little finger and flipped the Barbie's head. It went thack thack against the door. I flipped it again. Thack thack. Whee. I had a new hobby.

Marvel Comics has always been a place where I felt at home. It has been a very important part of my life and has always been a wellspring of creative and relevant ideas.

Pretending is the basis of civilised society, and it is sometimes necessary for all of us. Without it we are nothing more than a pack of snarling dogs.

I do as much as I can. I even drive through the chase scenes several times to make sure the details are right.

We're predators; we don't eat meat because it's handy, we eat meat because we have a taste for blood.

The first rejection that 'Dexter' got, I was like, 'OK. This hasn't worked. Let's try something else. I'll go get a teaching job or something.'

Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.

I certainly try to avoid getting bogged down in forensics. There is certainly a whole lot of other writers who know a lot more than me about it. I know enough about it to do a little bit of background on laboratory techniques and stuff. But it kind of bores me.

Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

Life's only obligation, afterall, was to be interesting.

Sociopaths don't have feelings; they can't.

We all pretend, we all hide things, so why not take the concept to an extreme? That is the basic idea for the character of Dexter. Pretend to be human, while quietly and carefully living out the life of a monster on the side.

I need quiet and solitude to work. Darkness is best. If I am wide awake, I can't write.

What a terrible thing life can be.

I don't agree with capital punishment as it is now, because too often mistakes are made. But I think that if you eliminate the mistakes, then there are times when it is justified.

Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they're quick to say, 'Put them to death,' or scream 'capital punishment.'

I know a lot of law officers, and every single one of them faces a moment - usually after about three hours on the job - when they realise that there's no connection between law and justice. The law, as an institution, avoids justice, subverts it, just as often as it sees it done.

I know a lot of law officers, and every single one of them faces a moment - usually after about three hours on the job - when they realise that there's no connection between law and justice.

I wish to God I was organized enough to tell you that, 'Yes, there will be 14 books, and this one will go here, and that one will go there'... but to be honest, I hardly know what I'm going to do when I get up in the morning.