463 Quotes by Lee Child

Sometimes if you want to know for sure whether the stove is hot, the only way to find out is to touch it.

Everything you could want - action, suspense, character and setting, all floating on the easy lyricism of a fine writer at the top of his game.

The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.

Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you do later. If you survive.

That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now.

It's a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?

Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes, and a brutal deep-frozen landscape all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cold nurtures good and evil as readily as heat ... and that Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime novelist.

Most actors are small, anyway - at least compared to me.

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.