Christopher Fowler

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My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began.
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Christmas
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As a child marooned in a post-war South London backwater with no ready cash and a bafflingly dysfunctional family, I had to glean my amusement wherever I could.
- Christopher Fowler
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The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
- Christopher Fowler
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I consider myself a kind of a nerd, because when we go to the coffee shop in the mornings, we sit there in a very neat row with our laptops. It's just like being at work, but with coffee and panini. And, of course, you don't get paid.
- Christopher Fowler
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I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.
- Christopher Fowler
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I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will.
- Christopher Fowler
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Too many new writers dress up old cliches.
- Christopher Fowler
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Reality TV has blown away the need for a roster of familiar faces in films. Plus, films became franchise and didn't need stars. But the real difference between stars and celebrities is that stars have training and talent, and celebrities just have exposure.
- Christopher Fowler
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My father worked in a scientific lab where he designed and built glass instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job and once constructed a human brain in glass just to show off his skills.
- Christopher Fowler
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I didn't bother with television myself because it consisted largely of windmills, puppets and pottery wheels, interspersed with elderly men smoking pipes while they discussed Harold Macmillan in Old Etonian accents.
- Christopher Fowler
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There's a melancholy sense of things lost in the shabbier British seaside towns; of comfortable failure and better times long gone.
- Christopher Fowler
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By the time I reached the sixth form at my local grammar school, my father would glower at me every time I passed him with a stack of books under my arm, warning me there was no money to go to university.
- Christopher Fowler
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I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency.
- Christopher Fowler
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For me, imagination would always provide a means of escape.
- Christopher Fowler
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My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs' Home of books.
- Christopher Fowler
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I have never met an author who did not read voraciously as a child.
- Christopher Fowler
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When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conceived Sherlock Holmes, why didn't he give the famous consulting detective a few more quirks: a wooden leg, say, and an Oedipus complex? Well, Holmes didn't need many physical tics or personality disorders; the very concept of a consulting detective was still fresh and original in 1887.
- Christopher Fowler
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Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter.
- Christopher Fowler
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Clutter, either mental or physical, is the sign of a healthy curiosity.
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Healthy
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Life is a very beautiful dream. I'm so glad I chose not to wake up from it just yet
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Beautiful
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It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Rain
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[Believers] have joy and comfort-that joy that angels cannot give, and devils cannot take.
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Christian
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I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart.
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Hate
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The drawings are terribly good.
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Drawing
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Kim Newman brings Dracula back home in the granddaddy of all vampire adventures. Anno Dracula couldn't be more fun if Bram Stoker had scripted it for Hammer. It's a beautifully constructed Gothic epic that knocks almost every other vampire novel out for the count.
- Christopher Fowler
Collection: Fun