John Connolly
I've been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy.
Writers are magpies by nature, always collecting shiny things, storing them away and looking for connections of things.
There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.
I find that I take a great deal of pleasure knowing I get up people's noses to some degree.
The only person who needs to know about failure is yourself.
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.
If you work at home, you're always on call in a way.
As I get older I tend to rail against the world more and more.
I think people are confusing the right to write with the right to be published.
Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.
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.
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.
For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.Collection: Children
He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.Collection: Children
I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.Collection: Reading
42. Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don't particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don't be one of those people. There's a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do. It really is that simple. And that hard.Collection: Jobs
Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away.Collection: Blow
There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain, and exist only to visit that pain on others. A random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, is enough to give them the excuse that they seek. Sometimes, it is better to keep your eyes on the gutter for the fear that, by looking up, you might catch a glimpse of them, black shapes against the sun, and be blinded forever.Collection: Pain
This world is full of broken things: broken hearts, broken promises, broken people.Collection: Heart
You can't prove that something doesn't exist. You can only prove that something does exist.Collection: Doe
Being scared isn't the problem. It's not running away that's the hard part.Collection: Running
We all have our routines," he said softly."But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.Collection: Animal
They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.Collection: Angel
Each man dreams his own heaven.Collection: Dream
I am sorry," I whispered. "I am sorry for all of the ways that I failed you. I am sorry that I was not there to save you, or to die alongside you. I am sorry that I have kept you with me for so long, trapped in my heart, bound in sorrow and remorse. I forgive you too. I forgive you for leaving me, and I forgive you for returning. I forgive you your anger, and your grief. Let this be an end to it.Collection: Sorry
He had quite liked the dwarfs. He often had no idea what they were talking about, but for a group of homicidal, class-obsessed small people, they were really rather good fun.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Song
I dream dark dreams. I dream of a figure moving through the forest, of children flying from his path, of young women crying at his coming. I dream of snow and ice, of bare branches and moon-cast shadows. I dream of dancers floating in the air, stepping lightly even in death, and my own pain is but a faint echo of their suffering as I run. My blood is black on the snow, and the edges of the world are silvered with moonlight. I run into the darkness, and he is waiting. I dream in black and white, and I dream of him. I dream of Caleb, who does not exist, and I am afraid.Collection: Running
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).Collection: May
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?Collection: Believe
Luck ran out, but smart was for life.Collection: Smart
. . . For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven. And in the darkness David closed his eyes, as all that was lost was found again.Collection: Dream
I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.Collection: Hurt
a technician who uses the term “glitch” is like a Doctor who tells you you’re suffering from a “thingy,” except the doctor won’t tell you to go home and try turning yourself on and off again.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Pain
Why is there always one bloke in these boy bands who looks like he came to fix the boiler and somehow got bullied into joining the group?Collection: Boys
It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins.Collection: Morning
And David saw himself reflected in the Woodsman's eyes, and there he was no longer old but a young man, for a man is always his father's child no matter how old he is or how long they have been apart.Collection: Children
On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge.Collection: Revenge
He had never really speculated about this before, since demons came in all shapes and sizes. Indeed, some of them came in more than one shape or size all by themselves, such as O'Dear, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They're Overweight, and his twin, O'Really, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They're Slim When They're Not.Collection: Thinking
...it was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that.Collection: Lying
You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.Collection: Men
"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly." "really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?Collection: Jelly
If 'why' was the first and last question, then because I was curious to see what would happen was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was destined to be the reason for the end of things at the hands of man.Collection: Life
He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another's fear to animate it.Collection: Fear
My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.Collection: Men
David's mother would often tell him stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way people were alive,or even dogs or cats. People were alive whether you chose to notice them or not, while dogs tended to make you notice them if they decided that you weren't paying enough attention. Cats, meanwhile, were very good at pretending people didn't exist at all when it suited them.Collection: Mother
I thought it was her wicked stepmother who poisoned her...' '...Turned out the wicked stepmother had an alibi.' '...Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time. Chance in a million, really. It was just bad luck.Collection: Luck
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.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Light