Lee Child
Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into.Collection: Government
Slippery slope. I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I'm carrying spare pants. Then I'd need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I've got a house and a car and a savings plan and I'm filling out all kinds of forms.Collection: Car
I was in the machine. My whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat me out. So I thought, OK, if I'm out, I'm out. All the way out. I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it.Collection: Immature
Now they broke my toothbrush, I don't own anything.Collection: Broke
My mother still calls me Jim and that is about it. Everyone else calls me Lee. My wife calls me whatever.Collection: Mother
I was in television drama, which is a first cousin to the movies, and I trust myself to make the right decisions.Collection: Cousin
Everything you could want - action, suspense, character and setting, all floating on the easy lyricism of a fine writer at the top of his game.Collection: Character
Lone women shouldn't stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.Collection: Giants
People who wear glasses, without them they always look unfocused, vulnerable. Out in the open. A layer removed.Collection: Glasses
This was like July 13th, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of the Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.Collection: Running
I'm opposed to censorship of any kind, especially by government. But it's plain common sense that producers should target their product with some kind of sensitivity.Collection: Government
She's a reflection of my fascination with the diversity of America she's totally normal in New York, but a freak in Texas. There are dozens of such clashes in America.Collection: New York
He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch.Collection: Redneck
I'm not really into gourmet food; I'm the kind of guy who just stops by a place that looks good rather than heading for the restaurant of the moment.Collection: Guy
What do I miss about the UK? Sadly, almost nothing. Maybe the midnight sun, in June in the north. That's all.Collection: June
The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.Collection: Dawn
I had been coming to America very frequently for many, many years, so I had plenty of exposure - and maybe the best kind of exposure, because I think first impressions are very important. Maybe I notice stuff that is just subliminal to people who live here all the time.Collection: Thinking
To fill a small bag means selecting,and choosing, and evaluating. There's no logicial end to that process. Pretty soon I would have a big bag, and then two or three. A month later I'd be like the rest of you.Collection: Mean
You do not mess with the special investigators.Collection: Special
I felt alienated by the experience and decided to stay away from corporate employment.Collection: Stay Strong
I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.Collection: Writing
Anecdotally his fitness reports rated him well above average in the classroom, excellent in the field, fluently bilingual in English and French, passable in Spanish, outstanding on all man-portable weaponry, and beyond outstanding at hand-to-hand combat. Susan knew what that last rating meant. Like having a running chainsaw thrown at youCollection: Running
He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.Collection: Crush
I'm not a vagrant... I'm a hobo. Big difference.Collection: Differences
For me the end of a book is just as exciting as it is for a reader.Collection: Book
LA has a fantastic car scene and because the climate is so gentle, cars can last forever.Collection: Car
Full of thrills and tension - but smart and human too.Collection: Smart
I love Italian food but that's too generic a term for what's available now: you have to narrow it down to Tuscan, Sicilian, and so on.Collection: Italian
I had a teacher once, grade school somewhere. Philippines, I think, because she always wore a big white hat. So it was somewhere hot. I was always twice the size of the other kids, and she used to say to me: count to ten before you get mad, Reacher. And I've counted way past ten on this one. Way past.Collection: Teacher
I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.Collection: Lying
It gives me some kind of chance to survive the night." "How are those better odds? If you come back with me, you're guaranteed to survive the night." "No," Reacher said. "If I come back with you, I'm guaranteed to die of shame.Collection: Night
Reacher said, "So here's the thing Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I'll take it off your wrist.Collection: Hands
I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.Collection: Jobs
Most actors are small, anyway - at least compared to me.Collection: Actors
He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order. The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face. "What?" Reacher asked her.Collection: Men
I grew up in Birmingham, where they made useful things and made them well.Collection: Grew Up
I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.Collection: Writing
All of us write wish fulfillment.Collection: Writing
That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now.Collection: Despair
I like food, like any other guy, but it is not the main thing in my life. I can do without it.Collection: Guy
It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.Collection: Moving
I went to college. West Point is technically a college.Collection: College
I'd been a thriller reader all my life.Collection: Thrillers
I was fired from my television job, simple as that. Well, downsized, really, a classic 1990s situation.Collection: Jobs
So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.Collection: Jobs
The British regulatory system was revised, so that bigger profits were encouraged, which removed the option of big spending on programming. Quality just fell off a cliff, and all the old hands either left or were fired for being too expensive.Collection: Hands
I have a kind of old-fashioned, artisan approach.Collection: Kind
I don't need validation, recognition or praise. What I need are facts and the facts are that one of my books gets sold, somewhere in the world, every second.Collection: Book
I've discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.Collection: Book