81 Quotes by Philip Kerr

Being dead is a pretty good alibi for anyone who’s in trouble with the law, but in Nazi Germany it was an existential hazard.

A lot of police work is police idle, police baffled, police at breakfast, police at lunch, police drinking coffee – if there is any coffee – and always police staring out of the window, assuming there is one.

One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany’s favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.

The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft. Her hair was every bit as natural as a parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she’d evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she’s applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth.

At least that was what she had told me. You never know with women. What they tell you and what they don’t tell you is a very long bridge across a very wide river with all kinds of fish.

Compared with the person who had decorated and furnished the place, the Archduke Ferdinand had been blessed with the taste of a troupe of Turkish circus dwarves.

Or, put another way, nothing evades our attention as persistently as that which we take for granted. That’s.

On the whole it’s not wise to remind the devil that he’s the devil, especially when we were getting on so well.

Horror does not need the dark, and sometimes a truly evil deed shuns the shadows.