Quotes from Adrian McKinty

I met my wife in Oxford, fell in love with her, and followed her to New York. I was an illegal there for the first few years, until we got married, so I ended up doing lots of interesting jobs, some for a few days, some for a few months.

It's been my experience that only children never learn when to keep their fucking traps shut. An older brother would have beat that out of you.

Forget him, he's just another red-shirted extra making a cameo appearance in our lives.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won't be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They'll do the state's work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.

We drank our whiskeys. It was the good stuff and it tasted of salt, sea, rain, wind and the Old Testament.

Don't worry, Duffy. I like you. We'll kill you last.

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.

Greek mythology has always been my Achilles elbow.

A man once told me that all books should end at chapter seventy-seven.

He was one of those characters who felt that a weak handshake could somehow damage his authority, which meant that every handshake had to bloody hurt.

A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.

A true predator sometimes kills even when it isn't hungry.

The darkness keeps its own counsel.

Johnnie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee

A bullet in the head will fix an incipient asthma attack every time.

Life is a cascade of nows falling on top of one another without meaning or purpose. Of all the philosophers, only Schopenhauer ever got that right.

Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.

If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world.

You painted it pink?' Price asked with a grin. 'That's lavender, you colour-blind eejit,' I said. McCallister saw that Price clearly hadn't got the message yet. 'Hey lads, you know why Price nearly failed the police entrance exam? He thought a polygon was a dead parrot.' The lads chuckled dutifully and somebody punched Price on the shoulder.

They have all sipped from the Drink Me bottle. They have all unwound the clew of red thread. They have all fallen through the looking glass.

Perhaps they are worse than evil—they are bored," Petra said.

Keeping pigeons without a licence is illegal as well, but we can't have people going round shooting pigeon-keepers, can we? It is the job of the RUC to enforce the law in Northern Ireland, not paramilitary groups, not vigilantes, not 'concerned citizens', it's our responsibility and ours alone," McCallister said which made me proud of him. Not quite tears-in-eyes but maybe warm-glow-in-tummy.

Intelligence is no substitute for wisdom. Live long enough to get wise, eh?