Lee Child Quotes

I am not interested in anything that doesn't have a genuine heart to it. You've got to have soul in the hole. If that isn't there, I don't see the point.

If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged.

'The Panorama' is also the last place anywhere in New York where the World Trade Center still stands, whole, as it stood in the early morning of September 11. I can also see the corner where I saw the first tower fall and howled out loud. Seeing the buildings again here is uplifting, healing.

You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.

I'm a New Yorker. I was there during 9/11, and I saw how, not only New York City stopped for a moment, we all took an inhale and exhale at the same time - the world united at that time, and it changed my life. I think millions of people were forever changed.

The movie business is not something that can come from the brain. It really comes from the soul and the heart.

Well, 9/11 made me think about the towers, and the fact that I lived in New York for a long time, while they were being built. In fact, I had a studio that was ripped out, along with the whole neighborhood, to put the towers in. I saw them go up. I lived with them, running past them in the morning. And they were like part of my furniture.

I'm a New York kid, so when I saw that plane that hit the first building, I suspected it was terrorism - blue sky day.

You can't mass produce somebody's heart and soul. It's a very delicate thing.

I went to New York to train as a chef, and I had the good or bad fortune, depending on how you describe it, of being right there during 9/11. It was one of the best and the worst experiences.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

Cute's good. But cute only lasts for so long, and then it's, 'Who are you as a person?' Look at the heart. Look at the soul. Look at how the guy treats his mother and what he says about women. How he acts with children he doesn't know. And, more important, how does he treat you?

New York is breaking my heart. I’ve often said that it’s like having a really interesting boyfriend suddenly becoming really, really into wine, and having to have endless conversations about it.

I read that book How to Hug a Porcupine [by Julie Ross] - it's my parenting bible. They say you have to trust your children and give them freedom. I say, OK, but this is New York City!

I came to New York to see what I could see - that's from a children's book, isn't it? - and to find the living part.

I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

Librarians are hot. They have knowledge and power over their domain...It is no coincidence how many librarians are portrayed as having a passionate interior, hidden by a cool layer of reserve. Aren't books like that? On the shelf, their calm covers belie the intense experience of reading one. Reading inflames the soul. Now, what sort of person would be the keeper of such books?

People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

I can't imagine my world without music. It's the universal language; what I make comes from my heart. What I listen to from others stirs it.

For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems.

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City.

Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart.