Quotes from Joseph Finder

Granted, no one actually uses Rolodex card files anymore. In fact, as a figure of speech, I prefer the concept of the favor bank. You do a favor for someone, help someone out of trouble, put someone in touch with someone else, make a connection . . . the odds are the person you helped out will pay you back.

The ignoble fate of the political appointee.

If the Monroe was like any other hotel I'd ever stayed in, it used a piece of software called a property management system, which kept track of every time a guest room door was opened from the outside using a keycard. So there was always what's called an audit trail.

monument to Victor Emmanuel II, a horrific typewriter-shaped structure of white Brescian marble, on the Piazza Venezia, shrouded in malign traffic fumes. Mussolini delivered his harangues here; I preferred to avoid it whenever possible.

Man, I think you're actually proud of being a Luddite.

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way. —ÉMILE ZOLA

She told them everything she could. Garvin asked all the questions; Scarpino, clearly the recessive gene, said nothing, took notes.

afraid of Slander Sheet. A lie this outrageous, you take it seriously.

I WAS wearing jeans and a slightly grubby polo shirt, partly to remind Koblenz that I wasn't on official Stoddard Associates business. And to let him know I wasn't playing by the rules of the suit-and-tie world. Also because it was more comfortable than a suit.

There is nothing we fear so much as the unknown, and the Surgeon was not going to enlighten her.

Heller," he called after me. "I don't know what you have up your sleeve, but I suggest you not bother. Like Sun Tzu said: 'All battles are won or lost before they're fought.

I can't tell you that, sir." The woman's voice had gone from bored-but-friendly to officious-and-stern.

Heller," he called after me. "I don't know what you have up your sleeve, but I suggest you not bother. Like Sun Tzu said: 'All battles are won or lost before they're fought.' " "He never said it," I pointed out. "That's from the movie Wall Street." "Doesn't make it wrong." "Well," I said. "I guess we'll see.

Never write if you can speak, never speak if you can nod, never nod if you can wink.

He was a fixer. He knew everyone who counted. He understood how things really worked in this town, as opposed to what they taught you in civics class or what you read in the papers, and he had a strong enough stomach to deal with all the creepy-crawlies you found when you turned over the rock.

Whenever he met with some politician who had qualms about hiring him to do oppo research—digging up dirt on a rival—Stoddard liked to quote Governor Willie Stark from All the King's Men: "Man is born in sin and conceived in corruption and passeth from the stench of the didie to the stink of the shroud. There is always something.

Did a few poor souls die because of the Big Dig? Son, a hundred men died building the Hoover Dam. A thousand men died building the Erie Canal. Four hundred Chinamen died building the transcontinental railroad. How about the Panama Canal? One of the greatest engineering feats in history? Thirty thousand men died building it. Ambitious projects always cost lives, son. That's the truth. Have you ever visited the great pyramids of Giza?

I got a stone in my shoe, Mr. Corleone,' " I said, quoting from the third Godfather movie.

crazy as a box of weasels.

You said electronic lock. I didn't know it was a TL-30X6." "I don't like your tone, Merlin. You sound very pessimistic. Maybe even defeatist." "Heller, listen to me. I brought my StrongArm safe cracker diamond-core drill bits, okay? But drilling through one of these, that's a five-hour job at least. That mother's made from inch-and-a-half-thick steel and cobalt-carbide matrix hardplate, okay?" "If you say so.

I had to assume, of course, that every word Koblenz had told me, including "and" and "the," was a lie. That was a given. But I operated on that assumption most of the time anyway: Washington, D.C., is to lying what Hershey, Pennsylvania, is to chocolate.

You know what I always say—never let an asshole rent space in your head." He

Then I reached the second building and saw the conflagration. A bonfire twenty feet high. The wreck of a Hummer, its carcass barely visible behind the veil of flame.

After all, as the old saw has it, lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.