Best 42 quotes of Andrew Vachss on MyQuotes

A dog is like a person—he needs a job and a family to be what he’s meant to be.

A free press doesn't mean it's not a tame press.

A kid in an abusive home has far fewer rights than any POW. There is no Geneva Convention for kids.

A moral society will not set standards for becoming a parent, but it will establish irreducible minimums for maintaining that sacred status.

Be he the first to stand or the last, a man must stand," the father had told his adoring son. "And if there is only one man, then that man must stand alone." ~Thomas to Bruce Wayne

Camouflage doesn't help when the other guy is willing to defoliate the whole jungle.

Children know the truth: love is not an emotion, love is behavior.

Evil is a matter of choice. Those people who have been victimized and refuse to imitate their oppressors are in my mind the greatest heroes we have.

Fear is an enemy that can be killed only at close range. The closest range of all is intimacy. The deeper the fear is embedded in one’s spirit, the more vulnerable it is.

From the very second that two people sat together around a fire in the forest, there was another human out there who felt better in the dark.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

I don't sign contracts for my books.

I don't understand people whose gratification is a BMW. You don't know what joy is until you see a kid who was tortured get adopted by a family.

If a train is coming at you, closing your eyes won't save you ... but if you look right at it, you at least have a chance to jump.

I'm in pursuit of what cannot be achieved: perfection.

Information is the hardest currency.

I think people should be consumers of journalism.

It isn’t much use writing slogans on a wall if you plan to total the building.

I want to disabuse people of the idea that knowledge is power. Knowing how to get to Detroit is not the same thing as having the bus fare.

Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That's why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.

Journalism is what maintains democracy. It's the force for progressive social change.

Life is a fight, but not everyone’s a fighter. Otherwise, bullies would be an endangered species.

Max Allan Collins blends fact and fiction like no other writer.

Most investigators don't even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they'd ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.

No politician is threatened by the child protective constituency, because it does not exist.

People are pushing against the fabric of society all the time.

People who don't have much get ugly about giving up the little they have left.

Roots are nice, but a tree can’t run.

Stealing to eat ain’t criminal—stealing to be rich is.

The Bowery station on the J line is what happens to a neighborhood once politicians realize the people who live there don't vote.

The Humane Society of America thinks Michael Vick should have a dog. I think whoever's in charge there should have a lobotomy.

The more bullets flying, the less accurate each individual slug has to be.

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

The worst place to be is in the middle. When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

When you hunt predators, the best camouflage is weakness.

A couple of buffoons were running for some state-senate seat just vacated by the incumbent's prison term. One accused the other of being "against the Internet" - a knockout punch in a world where whole hordes of humans think better sex is a faster modem.

Family' is not just a biological word, it's an an operative one.

In my world, people are always plotting. You have no idea of all the crimes people in business commit every day. Like it was nothing. Or there’s a set of special rules for them. Remember when Bush made that whole speech about ‘corporate ethics’ last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or WorldCom is an aberration? It’s only the tip. Business is a religion. Probably the only one practiced all over the world.

Max can’t hear or speak, but he communicates okay. He wasn’t programmed for fear—whoever rolled the genetic dice left that out too. If Mama asked Max to deliver a package to the Devil, Max would go straight to Hell. Unlike others of my acquaintance who had made that particular trip, I had complete confidence that Max would come back. Max the Silent is one tough boy. In fact, he’s so infamous that one time over in night court when he was being arraigned for attempted murder, nobody even laughed when the judge told him that he had the right to remain silent. They all knew that Max never attempted to murder anyone.

That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the first island they took over.