Quotes from Adrian McKinty

With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they'd be cooking chips at this hour was anyone's guess.

How do you feel about homosexuals, Mr. Scavanni?' I asked. 'I think they're great. More women for the rest of us,' he said sarcastically.

The Bible says that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Well, trouble followed me like sharks trailing a slave ship. Even when I tried to get away it was there swirling in a vortex around me.

A cocked .38 doesn't feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you.

Ideally, the business and the personal should never mix, but with human beings there's always going to be some blurring of the lines.

After secondary school, the big thing to do was apply for uni in England or Scotland and then just stay there.

I used to get a lift to school every day with a man who was a major in the British Army.

I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master's in philosophy.

I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew - people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don't remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week.

I was knocked down and dragged by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run.

A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone,' in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican's daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered.

People in the North are really taciturn and reticent, and they don't really like to talk about the past.

We were living in Denver, Colorado, and I was teaching high school. I asked the kids to write a short story, so I thought I should write some myself.

The problem with Double Fantasy was the arrangement whereby they alternated John Lennon tracks with Yoko Ono tracks. You couldn't escape Yoko for more than four minutes at a time.

You're a glass-half-empty kind of guy, sir, aren't you? I don't even acknowledge the existence of the glass, son.

Even when you were completely wrong about something, the journey into your wrongness was always fucking interesting.

You ever read Thucydides? I'll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing.

Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn't like that?

It only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

We're all riding on our bubbles, she thinks, we're all waiting for the blessèd break.

Number one: you are not the first and you will certainly not be the last. Number two: remember, it's not about the money—it's about The Chain.

She reflected that the Mad Max movies had been skillfully edited to erase the actual tedium of driving through outback Australia.

Fear is coursing through her, but fear is a liberation too. Fear releases power and is the precursor to action.

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.