Quotes from Christopher Fowler

He had completely lost his listeners. They were complaining to each other in dissatisfaction and disarray. 'That concludes the tour for today,' he added hastily. 'I think we'll skip question time, you've been a truly dreadful audience.' He decided not to bother with his tip box as the mystified, grumbling group was forced to disperse across the windy bridge.

In the history of the world, no censor has ever been looked back on with respect.

The tax authorities go after small firms and individuals instead of the worst avoiders.

Accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope—Martin Luther King Jr.

The world will need sceptics after the war is over. Too many people are ready to believe anything they're told.

They're students. We might learn a thing or two if we talked to them occasionally.' Bryant stopped dead and studied his partner. 'Do you have any idea what they see when they look at us? Let me give you a clue. In Tanzania they discovered a dinosaur fossil 243 million years old. Add another couple of years on that, and that's how we appear to them. I smell of aniseed and tobacco and you tint the grey out of your hair.

Three deaths—by snakebite, by explosion, by razor. What next? Death by hot air balloon? Cannon? Trident?

people never change. What you think you see is what you see. See?

You're stuck in the past,' sighed May, returning to his paper. 'I'm not, I'm just too busy catching up to deal with the present. I'll get to the present eventually.' He dug his knife back into the toaster. 'You mean you'll get to it at some time in the future.' 'Yes, when I've finished with the past. I want to know everything before I die, and I'm running out of time.' His knife slipped and catapulted breadcrumbs across the office.

You know there's something seriously wrong with your life when the high point of your Christmas Day is worming a cat, but, as Mr Bryant likes to remind me, anyone seeking dignity will find it in the dictionary just after 'death,' so let's move on.

These hippie writers are selfish and irresponsible. I'll tell you what made our nation the bastion of patrician morality it is today: the ability to be profoundly miserable. It's one of our greatest strengths, to be ranked beside shutting the boozers at ten-thirty and regarding the waterproof mackintosh as an acceptable item of clothing.

Bryant wanted to be outside digging up corpses and chasing (as much as his bad leg would allow) unscrupulous but fiendishly brilliant villains through the back alleys of the city. Instead he was meeting a clerk about forgotten bits of paperwork.

By Monday afternoon it was as if the hiatus of the last month had never occurred. Ten crates unloading, nine boxes opened, eight phones ringing, seven staff complaining, six desks in various states of assembly, five damaged chairs, four cases pending, three workmen hammering, two computers crashing and a cat locked in a filing cabinet with no key. Arthur Bryant was sitting back at his desk, beaming amidst the chaos, looking for all the world as if he had never left.

They'll be working through until it's done, so Janice has gone to KFC for a bargain bucket. They're dining al desko.

And this is true of all terrible crimes; it's the victims who must be respected and honoured, not the murderers

Life is one big bloody trick played on the unsuspecting.

The urban middle class destroyed, the working poor exploited, the vulgar rich elevated to eminence, the underclass demonised, the wasteland of celebrity held in veneration.

Agatha Christie's tales were aggressively anti-intellectual and crueller for it; hers was a world where confirmed bachelors committed suicide out of shame.

He glanced up and saw with horror that a tramp had wandered into the restaurant, and that the tramp was, on closer inspection, his partner.

The big companies dictate the terms and use their lawyers as henchmen.

Poor old George Orwell got it hopelessly wrong, forever worrying about state control when he should have been more afraid of the opposite. The political parties absented themselves and became mere functionaries for the real centre of power—the banks.

He's got the charm of a rectal probe, and no social skills to speak of, so nobody wants to go for a drink with him. Let's face it, dogs have more to look forward to in later life—at least they can go to the park and roll in shit.

Leave the thought, it will surface when it's ready

Gathered together in this fashion, Jerry could see that the Whitstables possessed certain common physical characteristics, including wayward teeth, large earlobes, and the sort of stress-related blotchiness usually found in cornered jellyfish.