The Word is Murder Quotes

“But the thing is, you see -and to be honest, I don't like to mention this- I'm a bit short. There just aren't enough people getting murdered.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Hawthorne certainly had a magnetic personality. Although, of course, magnets can repel as well as attract.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“There are some people who argue that we are too sensitive these days, that because we’re so afraid of causing offence, we no longer engage in any serious sort of argument at all. But that’s how it is. It’s why political chat-shows on television have become so very boring. There are narrow lines between which all public conversations have to take place and even a single poorly chosen word can bring all sorts of trouble down on”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Again, I found myself wondering what it must be like to work there, sitting in a room with those miniature urns, a constant reminder that everything you were and everything you’d achieved would one day fit inside.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“You never realise how fragile everything is until it breaks. And that day it was all smashed.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“For him, politeness was a surgical mask, something he slipped on before he took out his scalpel.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“We need to tolerate intolerance.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Stop right there,' I said. 'If we're going to have rules, the main rule is that you never ask me about my private life: not my books, not my TV, not my family, not my friends.'
'I'm interested you put them in that order...”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Diana Cowper had planned her funeral and she was going to need it. She was murdered about six hours later that same day.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“It was as if she had been locked up in a lunatic asylum for so long that she had forgotten she was actually mad.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“As a rule, I don’t go to funerals. I find them too horrible and upsetting and the older I get, of course, the more invitations I receive. As a favour to my friends, I’ll make sure that none of them are told the date of mine.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“You never realise how fragile everything is until it breaks.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“It was a quotation from Harold Macmillan, who had once been asked what politicians should fear. His answer was: ‘Events, dear boy, events.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“You wanted sex. You were cheating on your wife. And because of that, a child died.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“The grieving widow,’ Hawthorne muttered. ‘Do you think so?’ ‘No, Tony. I’ve seen more grief at a Turkish wedding. If you ask me, I’d say there’s a lot of things she’s not telling”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“If he didn’t watch his diet, quit smoking and take exercise, he would soon be back in the cemetery for a more permanent visit.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Diana Cowper had enough equipment to cook a Michelin-starred meal for ten but probably went to bed with a boiled egg and two pieces of toast.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“handsome as a child but something had happened to him at some time in his life so that, although he still wasn’t ugly, he was curiously unattractive. It was as if he had become a bad photograph of himself.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“He’s a prat. Just make sure you write that down”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Almost two hundred thousand books are published in the UK every year and although some of them will have the advantage of a well-known author attached, the vast majority have just two or three words on a surface measuring no more than six by nine inches to sell themselves. Titles have to be short, smart and meaningful, easy to read, easy to remember and original. That's asking a lot.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Café Mortel, an opportunity to discuss one’s mortality over tea and cake.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“in fact, I would have said that at least seventy-five per cent of the most important clues were written down in my notebook. It was just that I hadn’t quite realised their significance.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Over the course of an hour, I’d tried to explain to them how a good actor will always find things in a script that the writer doesn’t know are there while a bad one will insert things that the writer would prefer they didn’t. I’d talked to them about the way a character is created. Christopher Foyle, for example, existed on the page a long time before Michael Kitchen was cast but only when that decision had been made did the real work begin. There was always a tension between the two of us. For example, Michael insisted almost from the start that Foyle would never ask questions, which made life difficult for me and seemed, to say the least, unusual for a detective. And yet it wasn’t such a stupid idea. We found other, more original ways to get to the information that the plot demanded. Foyle had a way of insinuating himself, getting suspects to say more than they intended. In this way, year after year, the character developed.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“I don’t like Victoria and hardly ever go there. Why would I? It’s a weird part of London on the wrong side of Buckingham Palace. As far as I know, it has no decent restaurants, no shops selling anything anyone could possibly want, no cinemas and just a couple of theatres that feel cut off and separated from their natural home in Shaftesbury Avenue. Victoria station is so old-fashioned you almost expect a steam train to pull in and the moment you step outside, you find yourself lost in a haphazard junction of shabby, seedy streets that all look the same. In recent years, they’ve introduced cheerful guides who stand on the forecourt of the station in bowler hats, giving tourists advice. The only advice I’d give them is to go somewhere else.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“The grieving widow,’ Hawthorne muttered. ‘Do you think so?’ ‘No, Tony. I’ve seen more grief at a Turkish wedding. If you ask me, I’d say there’s a lot of things she’s not telling us.’ The taxi passed through the traffic lights at the top of Brick Lane and disappeared. Hawthorne smiled. ‘She didn’t even ask how he died.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“It was extraordinary how quickly he had been dehumanised – and worse was to come. When they were finally ready to remove him, two men knelt down and wrapped him in polythene which they sealed with gaffer tape. The process turned him into something that reminded me of both ancient Egypt and Federal Express.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Meadows scowled. ‘Anything else you want to know?’ ‘Yes. Did you find the cat?’ ‘What cat?’ ‘That answers the question.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“fuck off. I'm a police officer.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder

“Agatha Christie is something of a hero of mine but I was still offended.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder