Best 110 quotes of Lee Child on MyQuotes

A handgun at two hundred feet is the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.

All of us write wish fulfillment.

Anecdotally his fitness reports rated him well above average in the classroom, excellent in the field, fluently bilingual in English and French, passable in Spanish, outstanding on all man-portable weaponry, and beyond outstanding at hand-to-hand combat. Susan knew what that last rating meant. Like having a running chainsaw thrown at you

A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give. Because of duty, and honor, and service. You understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward.

British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography.

Don't be sad that roses have thorns. Be glad that thorns have Roses. Today's the day I worried about yesterday and it didn't happen.

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.

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.

For men, as they get bogged down with responsibilities, commitments, bureaucracy, it is a fantasy just to think of shedding everything literally, walking away with nothing at all, and just hitting the road.

For me the end of a book is just as exciting as it is for a reader.

Full of thrills and tension - but smart and human too.

He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch.

He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order. The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face. "What?" Reacher asked her.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

I always wanted to be in the world of entertainment. I just love the idea of an audience being happy with what I am doing. Writing is showbusiness for shy people. That's how I see it.

I'd been a thriller reader all my life.

I don't care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

I don't need validation, recognition or praise. What I need are facts and the facts are that one of my books gets sold, somewhere in the world, every second.

I felt alienated by the experience and decided to stay away from corporate employment.

I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.

I had a teacher once, grade school somewhere. Philippines, I think, because she always wore a big white hat. So it was somewhere hot. I was always twice the size of the other kids, and she used to say to me: count to ten before you get mad, Reacher. And I've counted way past ten on this one. Way past.

I had been coming to America very frequently for many, many years, so I had plenty of exposure - and maybe the best kind of exposure, because I think first impressions are very important. Maybe I notice stuff that is just subliminal to people who live here all the time.

I have a kind of old-fashioned, artisan approach.

I have the "thing" worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

I have three desks. One empty for paperwork, one for the internet and email, and one for the writing computer.

I just felt from personal observation that there is nothing more dislocated or alienated than a lifelong military person trying to cope in civilian life. It's like two completely separate planets.

I love Italian food but that's too generic a term for what's available now: you have to narrow it down to Tuscan, Sicilian, and so on.

I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.

I'm not really into gourmet food; I'm the kind of guy who just stops by a place that looks good rather than heading for the restaurant of the moment.

I'm opposed to censorship of any kind, especially by government. But it's plain common sense that producers should target their product with some kind of sensitivity.

I'm twenty-nine, yes really, I'm from Aspen, Colorado, I'm six feet one, yes really, I've been at Quantico two years, yes I date guys, no I dress like this just because I like it, no I'm not married, no I don't currently have a boyfriend, and no I don't want to have dinner with you tonight.

I need a stimulating environment to write because my books are driven at 100 miles per hour at a time.

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.

I said nothing. I’m good at saying nothing. I don’t like talking. I could go the rest of my life without saying another word, if I had to.

It gives me some kind of chance to survive the night." "How are those better odds? If you come back with me, you're guaranteed to survive the night." "No," Reacher said. "If I come back with you, I'm guaranteed to die of shame.

I think my books come out very visual, which is an obvious consequence.

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

I've discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

I was fired from my television job, simple as that. Well, downsized, really, a classic 1990s situation.

I was in television drama, which is a first cousin to the movies, and I trust myself to make the right decisions.

I went to college. West Point is technically a college.

I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.

LA has a fantastic car scene and because the climate is so gentle, cars can last forever.

Many years from now when your children ask what New York City was like just after 9/11, this will be the book you give them in response. It's an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence, and it's the one this great New York author was born to write.

My mother still calls me Jim and that is about it. Everyone else calls me Lee. My wife calls me whatever.

Never forget a Favor, Never forgive a Slight!

No, I'm a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don't, I don't.