Quotes from Val McDermid

The habit of loving is definitely one to be cultivated.

When I realized I was going to have to become a killer, the memory of the torture museum rose before me like a muse. I've always been good with my hands.

It didn't matter that he knew there was a serial killer loose in Bradfield. He couldn't afford to be the one to say it first.

He was about to pursue a course of action that would be as popular with his Chief Constable as a priest in an Orange Lodge.

Everyone thinks themselves unique when they fall in love. The truth is, we all lose ourselves in the same way. Whether it takes hours or days or weeks, we all find ourselves in a place of wonder and urgency, where we believe nobody has ever been before to quite the same degree. If everyone felt like this, our script goes, the world would come to a grinding, grinning halt.

She didn't intend her career to hit the buffers just because she'd made the mistake of opting for a force run by Neanderthals.

This was a civilized country. The fascists could never gain a hold here. That was the received wisdom, anyway. But Germany too had been a civilized country. No one could predict what might happen in any country when the numbers of the dispossessed reached a critical mass. Anyone who promised salvation would find a following.

FROM 3½Ã¢â'¬Â³ DISC

Two relationships in the past six years, both of which she'd hung on to long past the sell-by date. They reminded her of a poem she'd once read about love being a kite you couldn't let go of till somebody gave you something better to do. Although

Any sensible person knows that it's only postponing the evil hour, but when you're in debt up to your eyeballs, you stop thinking straight. You get into this self-deluding fantasy that if you can just get over this hump, you'll be heading towards getting straight again. Nobody cons themselves better than a bad debtor.

give it your best shot. And if you fail? What is it they say? "Try again. Fail better.

The abbey was vampire heaven.

the brutality and barbarism of those dying years of the twentieth century in that corner of the Balkans. The Second World War was supposed to have put an end to that sort of savagery in Europe; Kosovo had been the worst kind of wake-up call to remind everyone how thin was the skin of civilised behaviour.

My body's a temple to a different god from hers.

true love wasn't about gazing into each other's eyes. It was about standing shoulder to shoulder, facing in the same direction.

Edwardian house in Worcester

injuries were consistent with murder rather than accident.

That what I have is not women's intuition but a finely honed copper's instinct for when things aren't right.

Which translated, Stacey thought cynically, to 'If you're going to break the law – what I don't know can't hurt me.

It's more about developing a sense of how he looks at the world. Motivation is highly individualistic. But what we all have in common is that we construct our own identities based on what we've learned of the world.

Gesualdo's Tenebrae Responsories for his son to upload to his iPod and listen to on the day of his burial.

Oh, for that first hit of the day, the blessed nicotine hitting the bloodstream and snapping the synapses to attention.

Tony took a deep breath and deliberately relaxed his body. He used breathing techniques to put himself into a light state of trance. He instructed his conscious mind to let go, to allow his higher self to access directly all he knew about Handy Andy and to answer for him. When he spoke, even his voice was different. The timbre was rougher, the tones deeper. 'I blended in. I took care. I watched and I learned.

A cold case was a story, constructed piece by piece. Sometimes the pieces arrived in the wrong order so it made no sense at first...at the end, if you found all the pieces, you had a coherent tale. Sometimes, though, you ended up with a stack of ill-assorted bits that didn't quite fit...Then it was like one of those novels that won literary prizes, the ones where you got to the end, closed the book and asked yourself, 'What just happened here?