Quotes from Peter David

If by reaction you mean critical reaction, I was confident that we were putting out a quality book [ Treachery]. So I was reasonably sure that we'd get positive notices.

When...has a mugging case ever heard a defense attorney claim, 'Your Honor, the victim was dressed in an Armani suit and wearing a Rolex. Clearly he was begging to be assaulted.'

The measure of a gen'leman is how he treats ladies. They can call themselves what they wants, but if what they says don't match up with how they behaves, well, what they do says far more of who they are than what they says they are does, if you gets my drift.

of a London nearly two centuries gone, back when it was a pox-infested, grimy, depressing, fog-bound, class-favoring, sprawling, noxious, odorous, and overall distasteful place in which to live and breathe and sicken and die—as opposed to modern times, wherein the pox has been largely attended to; so that's progress of a sort.

I will always have doubts...But I will always overcome them.

But, like most men of destiny, he wasn't going to allow trivialities such as truth to stand in his way. •

I think that, to some degree, all of us are fractured souls. Cut in half. And we wander through life looking for the rest of ourselves. And sometimes we're fortunate enough to meet someone who possesses, in themselves, the part of ourselves that we've been missing. We may not realize it on a conscious level, but definitely on a subconscious level. We see in someone else … something of ourselves.

As for Madelyne, she continued to ply her trade. But such a life takes a fast toll on a woman. It is easy to be a remote, untouchable beauty and stay that way for many, many years. And if a stunning tapestry is hung upon a wall, it remains unsullied and a work of art. However, if one drapes it across the floor of a pub and all manner of men tread upon it with their heavy boots, it's going to be worn rather thin, and rather quickly. Such was the case with my mother.

If I have a bow and arrow, Commander, I don't shoot a padded shaft to my target's left in order to express my annoyance. I fire a steel-tipped arrow into his leg.

There was more barley than beef in his stew.

Lack of movement is a formidable force to overcome.

Only in this world of topsy-turvy attitudes could outright stupidity, such as I had displayed, be something that got me high marks. I had an amused glimmering of a notion at that point: If I ever turned out to be a complete and utter fool, I could wind up running the whole kingdom. It was something to consider.

No. It happened. But if it simplifies your life to disbelieve it, then do so.

The battered and pathetic thing that represented any claim to conscience I might have had turned away from me in disgust. Oddly, I couldn't blame it. I was disgusted myself. Disgusted at my weakness and my lack of resolution, at my refusal to see justice through in the name of the woman who had borne me.

What the hell kind of person was capable of sounding erudite while losing blood out of his face by the pint?

Some time later, I sat in the wine cellar, staring at the walls while cradling a wineskin in my lap like a child, murmuring over and over as if lulling the child to sleep, 'I am shat upon. I am shat upon'.

And then he raised the welder to his face and flicked the switch.

He smelled meat burning and realized that it was him.

when it comes to the caprices and manipulations of the gods or God, whichever philosophy you may embrace, we are all of us merely pawns in their games, rather than players.

And at the end of every single day, I stood on the edge of a cliff and stared at the drop and kept trying to find the inner strength to jump off it. Every. Damned. Day. I wrestled with the question of whether to keep on living my lousy existence or simply putting an end to it. For three months. And every day I discovered that ending my life was not an acceptable solution.

From the look of things, in five minutes every building facing the square would be locked up tighter than a Romulan clam.

I guess it really had been brave . . . because it was so bugger-all stupid, and if there was one thing I'd come to realize, ti was that bravery and bugger-all stupidity went hand in hand.

I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false.

It seemed to me that, no matter what endeavor I was involved in, I was to be something of a sham.