66 Quotes by Christopher Fowler

Arthur, you used to sound your age. Now you’re sounding several centuries old.’ ‘What’s wrong with that? One of the great pleasures that used to come with senior citizenship was the right to be perfectly vile to everyone. You could say whatever you liked, and people excused you out of respect for your advanced years. But now that everyone is in touch with their emotions and says exactly what they feel, even that pleasure has been taken away. Is there nothing the young haven’t usurped?

I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy.

We spend our youth attempting to change the future, he explained, and the rest of our lives trying to preserve the past.

No more sending your clothes over to forensics to be dry-cleaned, no more running up kebab tabs on stakeouts and no more pawning items from the Evidence Room until payday.

If the killer had really wanted to keep his victim’s provenance hidden, he would have taken the head far away, or simply weighted it and thrown it into the fast-flowing tide of the Thames. The invention of the garbage bag had been a boon to murderers everywhere.

Tremble had a secret. Underneath his dreary exterior, he was quite interesting. When his penchant for investigating the area’s past was indulged, a light shown in his eyes and he became almost passionate, which is why his wife kept a stack of local history books on her bedside table.

I’m not working class anymore,′ he said. ‘I’m lower-middle. I use three types of oil in my kitchen. Admittedly one of them is WD-40, but that counts, doesn’t it?

Now, the tourist hot spots of the city were the very parts that made it like everywhere else. Was it possible to imagine those buildings without inhaling the animal-fat stink of McDonald’s or KFC? He never thought London would cease to appeal to him, but the little faded glory it still possessed was being scuffed away by the dead hand of globalization. On his down days he saw London as a crumbling ancient house, slowly collapsing under the weight of its own past.

There are always regrets, of course. But you have to try and make a difference without hurting anyone along the way, so that you can reach a final state of grace without shame.