89 Quotes by Mick Herron

He had never really lost his youth; he just kept it in a small room off the landing.

This was the blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later.

But the first bedtime story he ever did read me was Kim.' River could tell she recognised the title, so didn't elaborate. 'After that, well, Conrad, Greene. Somerset Maugham.''Ashenden.''You get the picture. For my twelfth birthday, he bought me le Carré's collected works. I can still remember what he said about them.'They're made up. But that doesn't mean they're not true.

If no sober day was wasted, then nobody could take one from her. Even if today brought a slip, the total would stay the same. All that would happen wag that she would not be adding to it. It was like money in the bank. If you missed a deposit, that didn't mean the sum grew smaller.

Half of the future is buried in the past. That was the prevailing Service culture.

It turned out that in the governance of a nation’s security, many absurd situations had to be worked around: a toxic clown in the Foreign Office [Boris Johnson], a state visit by a narcissistic bed-wetter [Trump], the tendency of the electorate to jump off' the occasional cliff [Brexit].

He and I, we're friends. Does that sound odd? Me, friends with a pinko journalist?'Nothing sounded odd to Lamb; except, perhaps, that people had friends.

Why am I telling you this?''So you'll have an excuse to kill me?''That's probably it.

We don’t like being out of the loop.”“You’re always out of the loop. The loop’s miles away. Nearest you’ll get to being in the loop is when they make a documentary about it and show it on the History Channel. I thought you were aware of that.