20 Quotes by Joseph Kanon

He was the first young man Alex had met since he arrived, all the others buried or missing, irretrievable. Then a few dragging steps and Alex saw why: a Goebbels clubfoot had kept him out of war.

How does anyone sleep?""You don't hear them after a while," Martin said." You get used to it."Maybe Martin had, new to Berlin. But what about the others, who remembered huddling in shelters every night , waiting to die, listening to the engine sounds how near?-the whining thrust as the nose was pulled up, free of the weight of it bombs, now floating somewhere overhead.

They stay for each other .The Americans don't leave because the Russians-"He stopped. "But of course they'll have to. It's not reasonable,"he said, a French use of word. "Why would the Russians stay? If Germany were neutral. Not a threat anymore.

The light now a line of vanishing dolt, like tracer bullets.

One of the things that's always interested me, from the first book on, is unintended consequences,

Perhaps history and distance and time enable us to face things that nobody particularly wanted to look at at the time, but it's very important that all of this be known. How did this happen?

This is the great crisis in Western culture; there's nothing comparable to it. How it could have happened, the level of responsibility that people take for it, I think, is still the great issue.

This must be I guess the most extreme form of unintended consequence, but it seemed to me a great metaphor for things that happen all the time.

I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready.