JOHN CONNOLLY

If you work at home, you're always on call in a way.

I think people are confusing the right to write with the right to be published.

The only person who needs to know about failure is yourself.

Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.

I find that I take a great deal of pleasure knowing I get up people's noses to some degree.

There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.

I've been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy.

What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.

I feel that I'll be buried in Ireland and don't think I'll ever live in the U.S. I'm not comfortable with many aspects of U.S. society - especially the justice system.

Writers are magpies by nature, always collecting shiny things, storing them away and looking for connections of things.

As I get older I tend to rail against the world more and more.

There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.

Each man dreams his own heaven.

This world is full of broken things: broken hearts, broken promises, broken people.

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

This life is filled with threats and danger, David. We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for the greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live, and one life to give. There is no glory in throwing it away where there is no hope.

We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).

I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?

She was plump, with dyed red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light.

Being scared isn't the problem. It's not running away that's the hard part.

I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.

Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.

‎"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly." "really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?

I don't think," he said, "that a vicar is supposed to beat a bishop to death, or even back to death." Mr. Berkeley looked down upon the remains of Bishop Bernard. "If anyone asks, we'll say he fell over," he said. "Lots of times.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.