Quotes from Tom Holt

A hero, Max said. A weirdness-haunted victim of circumstance who spends his days looking for things. Max grinned. That's what I just said.

humanity generally gets the Gods it deserves.

David made a small head gesture indicative of doubt. 'Look at it this way,' he said. 'They're all male figures, all of Italian origin. Maybe standing about all day being admired is what they like doing best.

Glory,' he added, reciting carefully, 'is the only commodity that seems to increase the more you spread it around.' I'd heard a similar version of that saying; it started Glory and dogshit are the two commodities . . .

As was usual in Tilling, the presence of the Wyses curbed the tongued and improved the manner of those around them...A silence generally fell on the company after Mr. Wyse had finished speaking, his language was so fine, so Augustan that it seemed a pity to defile its memory with effusions in the sugar tongue.

We don't ask that question. Why not? If I tell you the truth, you would not believe me. If I lie, you would believe me.

a man who perfectly exemplified the old saying that all work and no play makes Jack a management consultant)

Although her hearing was excellent, she had that gift of temporary deafness that is granted to so few.

I sincerely hope, that you will grow up to be both a hero and a magician - brave and clever, though there's excellent grounds for saying the two qualities are mutually exclusive. But what the hell.

Even if you were to discover it, I don't imagine you could simply shin up a drainpipe and jemmy open the bathroom window. Fort Knox is most likely a bus shelter in comparison.

But there you go. Nobody said life was supposed to be easy, or fair, or even a guaranteed minimum length.

The truth is, my life never went according to plan, or a plan, or anything resembling a plan. It just sort of sprawled. Some lucky people have lives like a new colony, where the public buildings and houses and streets and markets and town walls are all laid out and completed before the first settler moves in. The rest of us are like old villages which grew up haphazard, strung out along a road or squashed in between two mountains.

Wouldn't it be wonderful, wouldn't it be absolutely fucking grand if Life somehow contrived to let five minutes go by without dumping some new and incrementally horrible load of shit on my head from a great height?

Life is about eating and drinking and sleeping and breathing and working, and not being more unhappy than you absolutely have to.

You might've got a letter, and it might have been in her handwriting, but I'm prepared to bet you my front teeth in a simple platinum setting that Judy wrote it, for reasons so obvious they're visible from orbit.

If ever I have the time, I'm going to write a book about beauty and pain. They're so alike in so many ways: neither of them really exist, but both of them are strong enough to override the strongest human mind and turn wisest and bravest of us all into clowns. Someone who can command beauty and pain – well, they'd have all the bases covered, as we say where I come from.

Paul reached out his hand to help Sophie to her feet; she ignored him (she didn't hold with patronising gender-stereotypical conventions) and wobbled for a moment before her legs remembered how to cope with her weight.

Being a really evil bastard isn't just a job, it's a vocation!

Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

Everything is out there if you know how to find it, and have the patience. I don't and haven't, but that's my problem.

American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot, sunny day. It's never really caught on in the UK, probably because the last time we had a hot, sunny day was back in 1957.

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else.

Telling lies is a bit like tiling bathrooms - if you don't know how to do it properly, it's best not to try.