And if you cast down an idol, there's nothing left.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

I've always eaten well and have a balanced diet.

The biggest klutz would be myself, so if I could offer help to myself I would. I’m the most off my game most often.

I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.

Michael Winterbottom is one of the great directors of this century.

Suddenly Saracen Rue looked old and tired, and Skulduggery Pleasant came into focus as what he really was – a genius, a killer, a tortured soul, and the only true dead man among them.

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

You seldom get that in film where you're lucky if you get any say at all in the final cut.

I wish my name was Brian because maybe sometimes people would misspell my name and call me Brain. That's like a free compliment and you don't even gotta be smart to notice it.

As a writer, you get to bring attention to something without preaching. I don't believe in being didactic. So if you dramatize something, you automatically bring attention to it if people read it.