Quotes from Joseph Finder

The kid scared her sometimes, he was so smart. She wondered where he inherited it. Not from her gene pool, that was for sure. Richard, her first husband and Gabe's father, was smart enough but no genius. She also wondered from time to time whether being so precocious made him an outcast at his private boys' school. It couldn't be easy.

The truth was, Roger and I hadn't been close since Dad's trial. Maybe that was a euphemistic way of putting it. I didn't like the guy, and he didn't like me either. We barely tolerated each other.

As far as I could see, there weren't any fiber-optic sensors buried in the ground next to the perimeter fence. That would have been outrageously costly. Unnecessary, too. Instead, the facility was protected by a twelve-foot chain-link fence, six-gauge galvanized steel—extremely difficult to cut through—and topped by coils of razor wire.

But the reason that writers like Harlan and Lee don't outline is that they enjoy the serendipity, the surprises that arise when they're not constricted by the steel girdle of an outline. And I get that too. Some of the best plot twists in my work have been ones that I didn't plan on, including the ending to PARANOIA. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is living in the story so that you "experience" it the way your characters do.

JESUS LOVES YOU—EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE

He made a derisory snort.

Cars whooshed by. Somewhere nearby a dog was barking. A couple of girls in halter tops were smoking, which they couldn't do inside the Anchor. A gang of overgrown frat boys were jeering, and one of them was pissing in the alley next to the bar. The restrooms there were so malodorous that no one ever used them more than once.

Okay, okay," I said. I should have known better than to talk comic books with Gabe. "What I'm trying to tell you is, the right thing isn't always the easy thing." "Do I get a cookie with that fortune?" "You might want to watch the way you talk to your elders," I said sternly. "Yeah, right," he said, and he smiled, and I smiled, too.

My thoughts were still careening, still trying to make sense of Roger's strange and cryptic e-mail. If you get this, that means they finally succeeded, he'd written. So he was expecting to be killed. I've taken precautions to protect you and Gabe, he'd said. The means to hold them off. What could that be? Would Lauren know? And what was that bizarre postscript—Please say good-bye to the librarian—supposed to mean? A code, surely, but what?

The Special Forces motto was "De Oppresso Liber," not "Libre." Which meant "To liberate the oppressed.

wind. You can only control the sail.

never let an asshole rent space in your head.

He was helpless, and he knew it. But he was too stupid, and too truculent.

There was a time, not so long ago, when private military contractors were outside the law, you know." "Above the law." "No. Outside the law. We weren't covered by military law, and we weren't covered by civilian law.

grasped his right hand by the fingers and pulled them all the way back. His wrist made a muted snick noise when it broke, not the loud snap I expected. He let out a loud, agonized scream. His right hand—his gun hand, I assumed—dangled uselessly, like a marionette off its strings.

That's horse country, of course, where women do their shopping in jodhpurs or jeans with holes at the knees and men walk around in flip-flops and everyone gets Lyme disease.

Here, my brother got to feel as important, as baronial, as I was sure he didn't at work, where he no doubt just pissed people off.

The FBI is always finicky in its dealings with journalists. It views them as unreliable, uncontrollable, publicity-seeking loose cannons, which is largely true. Journalists view the FBI as hidebound, bureaucratic, and legalistic, which is also largely true.

We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Mom was the prettiest girl in his small-town high school, with looks that rivaled Grace Kelly's, and her early photos confirmed it. Victor Heller won her over by the sheer brute force of his charisma, by his indomitable will, his outsize ambition.

One of our housekeepers called him Eddie Haskell. We'd never seen that old TV show Leave It to Beaver, but years later when I saw a couple of reruns on late-night TV, I realized that our housekeeper really hadn't liked Roger. Eddie Haskell was an unctuous, conniving brown-noser. He was the two-faced character who'd politely compliment Mrs. Cleaver on her lovely dress while instigating some evil prank that would inevitably get her son, the Beaver, in trouble.