Best 51 quotes of Tom Holt on MyQuotes

American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot, sunny day. It's never really caught on in the UK, probably because the last time we had a hot, sunny day was back in 1957.

American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot

Among the gods, there is a dispute as to which one of them originally thought of Christianity; or, as they call it, the Great Leg Pull. Apollo has the best claim, but a sizeable minority support Pluto, ex-God of the Dead, on the grounds that he has a really sick sense of humour. How would it be, suggested the unidentified god, if first we tell them all to love their neighbour, pack in the killing and thieving, and be nice to each other. Then we let them start burning heretics.

At any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance

Descartes' immortal conclusion cogito ergo sum was recently subjected to destruction testing by a group of graduate researchers at Princeton led by Professors Montjuic and Lauterbrunnen, and now reads, in the Shorter Harvard Orthodoxy: (a) I think, therefore I am; or (b) Perhaps I thought, therefore I was; but (c) These days, I tend to leave that side of things to my wife.

Everything is out there if you know how to find it, and have the patience. I don't and haven't, but that's my problem

Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don't usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there's nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.

I don't read the Sunday papers; or the dailies, either

In spite of really intense competition for the job, I'm still my own worst enemy.

I try and do 2,500 words a day, every day of the year

It was irritating to have one's physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger.

Lawyers are predators in grey worsted

Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.

Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.

Mostly I sit at home in the evenings watching the box and hoping that one day I'll evolve into plankton.

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly; it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else

Not only had he lost the only girl he'd ever loved, he'd lost her in duplicate, like some heartbroken but highly efficient civil servant.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of

Telling lies is a bit like tiling bathrooms - if you don't know how to do it properly, it's best not to try.

There is that within a man that drives him ever onwards, just as the power of the seasons drives the roots of flowers into the hard earth; and so he decided, against his better judgment, to open his eyes and find out what was going to happen to him next.

There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to - learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad - but I just didn't have the time.

There’s nothing bad about reincarnation per se, it’s basically a very good system, cost-effective and ecologically friendly.

A brief note on the legend of Pandora's Box: Ever wondered why bundled in with all the torrents, and suffering of man kind the Gods put hope down there at the bottom, answer because in certain circumstances hope can be the worst torment of them all.

After all, why be right when you can be happy.

All good things must come to an end,' said Flosshilde, 'and I don't suppose he'll ever be interested in me even if he does get rid of her. Which is funny, really,' she said bitterly. 'After all, he's nothing special and I am, Heaven knows. But there you are.

As the Athenians to the Pnyx, the antique Romans to the Campus Martius, or our Nordic ancestors to the All-Thing, so the folk of Tilling flocked to the High Street for extempore parliament.

Books, the estate agent had told him, provide excellent insulation, and since the heating bills would be very considerable in any event, he might as well leave them there even if he had no intention of ever reading them.

Georgie paused on the threshold for a moment as if hesitant to enter the habitation of such a perjurer lest it should be struck by lightning.

Having finally come to the end of this narrative, Malcolm was left with two abiding impressions: first, that Fafner the dragon, instead of keeping his money under the mattress like everyone else, had kept his mattress under the money; second, that humanity generally gets the Gods it deserves.

He was ... at peace with the world, for it is not in the praise of others that the true artist revels, but in the knowledge that he has satisfied himself.

His role (if he had one, which he sometimes doubted) was to provide a comparison with his elder sister Bridget.

How careless of me!" By which she meant that she had deduced that he had found [them] in his pocket and pitied him for needing to be forever in the right.

Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.

If the Good Lord had intended us to crawl, he'd have given us a hundred legs and an exosqueleton.

If you’re mortal, all they can do to you is kill you.

I’m perfectly cheerful, thank you,’ said Flosshilde coldly.

I should hate to be employed and have no time for my needlework and my painting and playing the piano and seeing people. I find I have little enough spare time as it is." "Rubbish, caro, one can find time for important things if one makes an effort." conversation between Georgie and Lucia

It had all dropped into place, like the last bit of the jigsaw, which you thought all along was a bit of left-hand sky, but when you turn it over you realise it's the last chunk of right-hand sea, or the sky tricksily reflected in the surface of the pond.

Most thoughtful,"...[he said] politely. This cheerfulness was ambiguous, Had she determined to ignore ...[the] coup entirely--an established tactic, most irritating to the innovator but hard to sustain over long periods of time--or had she already evolved her counter-strategy?

Necessity is the mother of invention, which probably explains why invention’s father left home on the pretext of buying a newspaper and hasn’t been heard of since.

Pile up that gold around my head. I must take it with me to pay the ferryman.’ ‘I thought it was just a coin on the eyes or something.’ ‘Inflation. Also, I’ll take up rather a lot of room on the boat.

Realism without naturalism... is a leading motif in Modern Art. There is a move away from the struggle to perfect the reflection of Nature in Art's mirror, which I attribute to the all-pervading effects of photography...You must serve the tradition without being its slave. Remember you are an artist, not a draughtsman.

{She] laughed so that the street seemed full of little silver bells,

...[She] was not nearly so intrusive. If she happened to observe the comings and goings of her friends out of the corner of her eye (which she could hardly fail to do, given the nature of her favorite sitting-place) and chanced to be able to remember when she had seen them and where they had been going, it was simply a tribute to her keen powers of observation and recall. Conscious spying was beneath her altogether.

Such confusion was, however, his normal state of mind. Without it, he would feel rather lost. Confusion is the only possible result of a lifetime of being asked unanswerable questions by one’s parents and relatives, such as ‘What are we going to do with you?’ or ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ To judge by the frequency with which he encountered it, the latter problem was the truly significant one, to which not even the tremendous intellectual resources of his family had been able to find an answer.

Thanks anyway,' Vanderdecker repeated, and wandered off to have a stare at the sea. It was his equivalent to beating his head repeatedly against a wall.

The fact that he hated and feared his new environment was largely beside the point, for he had been taught long ago that what he thought and felt about any given subject was without question the least important thing in the world.

The next morning, Malcolm thought long and hard before waking up, for he had come to recognise over the past quarter of a century that rather less can go wrong if you are asleep.

There are few moments of clarity more profound than those that follow the emptying of an overcharged bladder. The world slows down, the focus sharpens, the brain comes back on line. Huge nebulous difficulties prove on close calm examination to be merely cloud giants.

This was partly laziness, partly caution; for if he was to remain nice and keep his mind free of malice or resentment, it would not be advisable for him to see any of his friends or relatives.