Quotes from Tom Holt

The doughnut was definitely looking at him. Hello, sailor, it seemed to be saying.

How careless of me! By which she meant that she had deduced that he had found [them] in his pocket and pitied him for needing to be forever in the right.

Birmingham City Council was playing third time lucky with the design of the city's celebrated Victoria Square . . .

Necessity is the mother of invention, which probably explains why invention's father left home on the pretext of buying a newspaper and hasn't been heard of since.

It had all dropped into place, like the last bit of the jigsaw, which you thought all along was a bit of left-hand sky, but when you turn it over you realise it's the last chunk of right-hand sea, or the sky tricksily reflected in the surface of the pond.

The logical flaws and inconsistencies that riddled the tale, far from making him doubt its veracity finally convinced him that it might indeed be true; for life is like that.

You'd have to crush a dozen Alexanders in an olive-press before you could extract enough humanity to make up an ordinary person. As a human being, he was tiny.

There ought to be a dictionary of smiles; somewere you can look them up and find out what they mean.

And if I've got to die, I want to die an editor.

Starting with the partners, we've got a goblin, a giant and the Queen of the Fey. Then there's Mr Shumway, he's a dwarf. And you're a pig, so really it doesn't look like being human's exactly a requirement, is it? In fact, they've probably only got a couple of token humans so as not to get in trouble with the equal-opportunities people.

Which is why I started writing this, I suppose - that and the money Dexitheus offered me, of course, and the prospect of something to do over the winter. Dear God, I really am starting to ramble now, aren't I? I'd better get on with the story, before I completely lose touch with reality.

I start off meaning to tell you a story, and then I get sidetracked with something that interests me, and I go wandering off all over the place; yet here we are, nicely on schedule, at the point where I have just met Phaedra and am just starting off on the long process of getting betrothed to her. In fact, we are here rather ahead of time; so, while we are waiting for the main stream of my narrative to catch up with us, I shall tell you about my first meeting with the Spartans.

Once, when I was young, I believed in democracy. When I was a little older, I believed in oligarchy, government by the enlightened few; after that, in monarchy, the rule of the philosopher-king. Now I believe only in drainage, public sanitation and clean water.

All good things must come to an end,' said Flosshilde, 'and I don't suppose he'll ever be interested in me even if he does get rid of her. Which is funny, really,' she said bitterly. 'After all, he's nothing special and I am, Heaven knows. But there you are.

I should hate to be employed and have no time for my needlework and my painting and playing the piano and seeing people. I find I have little enough spare time as it is. Rubbish, caro, one can find time for important things if one makes an effort. conversation between Georgie and Lucia

They were on foot, for the Royce had developed some curious wasting disease and was even more under the spanner.

As the Athenians to the Pnyx, the antique Romans to the Campus Martius, or our Nordic ancestors to the All-Thing, so the folk of Tilling flocked to the High Street for extempore parliament.

Of all selfish bastards, a selfish bastard who likes to be liked is probably the worst. Never

most of the inhabitants of Dirt were crowded into a pawful of major cities, while most of the surfaces of the main land masses were barely inhabited at all.

In the beginning there was the Word. Not, perhaps, the most auspicious start for a cosmos; because once you have a Word, sooner or later you find you've also got an annoying Paperclip, and little wriggly red lines like tapeworms under all the proper nouns, and then everything freezes solid and dies. This last stage is known to geologists as the Ice Age, and one can't help thinking that it could've been avoided if only the multiverse had been thoroughly debugged before it was released.

In fact, as they will be delighted to tell you, Taunton is no longer a one-horse town; these days, they have a bicycle as well . . .

I remember hearing that one very small allied contingent from a non-Greek city somewhere in the far south of Sicily had been completely wiped out except for a single man, and that for days afterwards he wandered round the camp looking completely lost, since there was no one left alive who could speak his language. I knew how he felt.

For in those days it was rare to see a man and a woman, especially a wife and her husband, laughing together in the street. Now, of course, things are very different, and nobody laughs at you or makes faces behind your back if you happen to mention that you are quite fond of your wife. Personally, I blame the modern craze for philosophy and this so-called New Comedy we hear so much about.

So now I have outlived all the good or interesting characters in this book, and you are left with me. If you do not share my undying fascination with myself, I suggest that you leave out the next bit and carry on down to the top of the last roll.