“Mind you, why they’d be cooking chips at this hour was anyone’s guess.”

The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book.

The chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet.

A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia’s most exciting new novelists.

If anyone can show me … that there is any reason – other than fear – to believe in any version of an afterlife, I’ll give you my piano, one of my legs, and my wife.

By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

I’ve considered having my nose fixed. But I didn’t trust anyone enough. If I could do it myself with a mirror.

It was all devastating. I’d never dealt with losing anyone close to me, and I didn’t know where to put it in my life.

If there is any change regarding that hope, we should ask the Syrian people, not anyone else in the world.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

Should anyone attempt to deceive you by false expressions, and not be a true friend at heart, act in the same manner, and thus art will defeat art. [If you would catch a man let him think he is catching you.]