325 Quotes by Ben Aaronovitch

Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who’ve figured out how to start a sentence but don’t know how it ends.

Dominic tooled up five minutes later in a ten-year-old Nissan pickup truck that had been painted a non-standard khaki, dipped in dried mud up to the wheel arches and then randomly smacked with a sledgehammer to give it that Somali Technical look. I found myself checking to see if there was a mount for a fifty-caliber machine gun in the back.

It’s a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park – it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

Is that your professional opinion?” “Yes.” “Which as usual,” said Seawoll, “is as about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

It’s an iron rule of mine that I never argue correlation versus causation in the middle of the night, especially when I had an alternative option.

One of his more famous sound bites was, ‘If you want something done, hire someone competent and then give them what they ask for.

Phillip told me proudly that his mum had ceased to be a practicing Catholic the day after he came out. “She says she will go back to the Church the day it apologizes,” he said.