Quotes from Lee Child

Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don't waste time. Don't figure out how or why it happened. Don't recriminate. Don't figure out whose fault it is. Don't work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you do later. If you survive.

Now they broke my toothbrush, I don't own anything.

I had a teacher once, grade school somewhere. Philippines, I think, because she always wore a big white hat. So it was somewhere hot. I was always twice the size of the other kids, and she used to say to me: count to ten before you get mad, Reacher. And I've counted way past ten on this one. Way past.

I don't care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.

The best fights are the ones you don't have", a wise man once said to me.

Spread love and understanding," Reacher said. "Use force if necessary.

I said nothing. I'm good at saying nothing. I don't like talking. I could go the rest of my life without saying another word, if I had to.

Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.

I know I'm smarter than an armadillo

To fill a small bag means selecting,and choosing, and evaluating. There's no logicial end to that process. Pretty soon I would have a big bag, and then two or three. A month later I'd be like the rest of you.

He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch.

Slippery slope. I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I'm carrying spare pants. Then I'd need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I've got a house and a car and a savings plan and I'm filling out all kinds of forms.

You do not mess with the special investigators.

Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn't live there. He lived in a world where you don't start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don't lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren't yet.

People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.

Like when people say they slept like a baby. Do they mean they slept well? Or do they mean they woke up every ten minutes, screaming?

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy's wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody's weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy's abandoned ordnance on the field in working order. The doctor's wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face. "What?" Reacher asked her.

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.'

I need a stimulating environment to write because my books are driven at 100 miles per hour at a time.

I'm not really into gourmet food; I'm the kind of guy who just stops by a place that looks good rather than heading for the restaurant of the moment.

I have a kind of old-fashioned, artisan approach.

I grew up in Birmingham, where they made useful things and made them well.