Quotes from Christopher Fowler

By the time I reached the sixth form at my local grammar school, my father would glower at me every time I passed him with a stack of books under my arm, warning me there was no money to go to university.

My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began.

I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency.

I didn't bother with television myself because it consisted largely of windmills, puppets and pottery wheels, interspersed with elderly men smoking pipes while they discussed Harold Macmillan in Old Etonian accents.

As a child marooned in a post-war South London backwater with no ready cash and a bafflingly dysfunctional family, I had to glean my amusement wherever I could.

Life is a very beautiful dream. I'm so glad I chose not to wake up from it just yet

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conceived Sherlock Holmes, why didn't he give the famous consulting detective a few more quirks: a wooden leg, say, and an Oedipus complex? Well, Holmes didn't need many physical tics or personality disorders; the very concept of a consulting detective was still fresh and original in 1887.

Reality TV has blown away the need for a roster of familiar faces in films. Plus, films became franchise and didn't need stars. But the real difference between stars and celebrities is that stars have training and talent, and celebrities just have exposure.

Too many new writers dress up old cliches.

There's a melancholy sense of things lost in the shabbier British seaside towns; of comfortable failure and better times long gone.

My father worked in a scientific lab where he designed and built glass instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job and once constructed a human brain in glass just to show off his skills.

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter.

It was a violent place in which to discover a purpose. It was a good place to forge a friendship.

Whenever the cadaverous Home Office security supervisor became involved in their affairs, babies cried, women cowered, innocence was punished and blame was wrongly apportioned.

I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy

My life was never intended to be one long slow descent into respectability.

Don't talk to me about sense. i've been alive for forty-seven years and I have absolutely no understanding of human nature whatsoever. I might as well be living with a completely different species, giant squids or perhaps some kind of insect colony.

If the killer had really wanted to keep his victim's provenance hidden, he would have taken the head far away, or simply weighted it and thrown it into the fast-flowing tide of the Thames. The invention of the garbage bag had been a boon to murderers everywhere.

The gap between rich and poor was not just one of wealth but of accountability.

We no longer whip people through the streets. Instead we send them to executive-level open jails for a few months' R&R before they hire PR teams to restore their reputations. Fraud, perjury, perverting the course of justice count as nothing

London and its people are parasites trapped in an ever-evolving symbiosis. At night the residents lose their carapace of gentility, bragging and brawling through the streets.

How could you begin to explain London? A city once the color of tobacco and carrots, now chalky stone and angled steel, but vivid chimney pots can still be glimpsed between slivers of rain-specked glass. Nine billion pounds' worth of Christmas bonuses have just been spent in the city's square mile.

London and its people are parasites trapped in an ever-evolving symbiosis. At night the residents lose their carapace of gentility, bragging and brawling through the streets. The old London emerges, dancing drunk skeletons leaving graveyard suburbs to terrify the faint of heart.

There are plenty of officers infiltrating the protestors and making lists of contacts