Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment--the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.

Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.

Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.

Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.

The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.

Humpty had always sat on walls, it was his way.

It wasn’t going to be hard…it was going to be impossible. It wouldn’t deter me. I'd done impossible things several times in the past, and the prospect didn’t scare me as much as it used to.