Quotes from Caleb Carr

Warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind. Terror must never be answered with terror.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

You want to believe that there's one relationship in life that's beyond betrayal. A relationship that's beyond that kind of hurt. And there isn't.

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety

I have to be very careful, however, because I have no intention of providing an excuse for this behavior. It's an attempt to explain how so many women come from backgrounds where the pressure to be a good mother is so severe that if they can't do it, something really snaps.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

I get in trouble when I say things like, 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

You want to believe that there's one relationship in life that's beyond betrayal. A relationship that's beyond that kind of hurt. And there isn't.

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.

Maybe memory was just a wicked curse, and the kind of mind what could wipe out painful recollections a blessing. Maybe .....

A man can be a bachelor, and still be a man—because of his mind, his character, his work. But a woman without children? She's a spinster, Stevie—and a spinster is always something less than a woman.

Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others; whatever seemed wrong to me, others approved of. I ran into feuds wherever I found myself, I met disfavor wherever I went; if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery; so I had to be called "Woeful": Woe is all I possess. Wagner, Die Walküre

Inevitably, I became distracted by tales that I knew held no promise for us—accounts of murders that had long since been solved, or whose salient characteristics were nothing like those of our case—but which were so morbidly fascinating on their own merits that I had to see how they turned out.

Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become.

Lawyers like that, as I've told you, generally think they have nothing to learn from Jesus Christ himself when it comes to being saviors with a mission. Annoying them is like falling off of a log, really.

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and the temerity to style themselves "New York Society.

And so the new century will bring a new kind of law,' was how Mr. Picton summed things up..... 'Proceedings where victims and witnesses are put on trial instead of defendants, where a murderer in identified as 'a woman' instead of an individual....If things go on like this we'll find ourselves in some shadow world, where lawyers use the ignorance of the average citizen to manipulate justice the way priests did in the Middle ages.

the answers one gives to life's crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.

leviathan that