Adrian McKinty Quotes & Sayings

Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse. — Adrian McKinty

Keeping pigeons without a licence is illegal as well, but we can't have people going round shooting pigeon-keepers, can we? It is the job of the RUC to enforce the law in Northern Ireland, not paramilitary groups, not vigilantes, not 'concerned citizens', it's our responsibility and ours alone," McCallister said which made me proud of him. Not quite tears-in-eyes but maybe warm-glow-in-tummy. — Adrian McKinty

After secondary school, the big thing to do was apply for uni in England or Scotland and then just stay there. — Adrian McKinty

With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they'd be cooking chips at this hour was anyone's guess. — Adrian McKinty

'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre. — Adrian McKinty

The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked. — Adrian McKinty

I speak with a Northern Irish accent with a tinge of New York. My wife has a bit of a Boston accent; my oldest daughter talks with a Denver accent, and my youngest has a true blue Aussie accent. It's complicated. — Adrian McKinty

Who do you think's after you, Shane, my lad? Or is it just the dark you're afeared of? — Adrian McKinty

I studied law at Warwick University, then philosophy at Oxford. I met my wife Leah there. She is American, so I followed her to New York. — Adrian McKinty

Johnnie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee — Adrian McKinty

More guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition. — Adrian McKinty

I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out. — Adrian McKinty

Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters. — Adrian McKinty

If you haven't read 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone', I reckon it's a pretty good place to start if you're new to me and my books. — Adrian McKinty

I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover. — Adrian McKinty

Our daughter's name Arwynn comes from Arwen in 'Lord of the Rings' because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another. — Adrian McKinty

I did the same thing as every Irish person who comes to New York. I arrived on a Wednesday, and by Saturday night, I was pulling pints at a pub in the Bronx. — Adrian McKinty

He was one of those characters who felt that a weak handshake could somehow damage his authority, which meant that every handshake had to bloody hurt. — Adrian McKinty

The winters in Denver are brutal; it snows from the end of October to April. — Adrian McKinty

When we moved to Australia in 2008, I decided to try to live off the writing. — Adrian McKinty

It's been my experience that only children never learn when to keep their fucking traps shut. An older brother would have beat that out of you. — Adrian McKinty

I think if you grow up in a culture where the army is out on the street sighting you with rifles, it has to have some kind of psychological impact. — Adrian McKinty

How do you feel about homosexuals, Mr. Scavanni?' I asked.
'I think they're great. More women for the rest of us,' he said sarcastically. — Adrian McKinty

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists. — Adrian McKinty

People in the North are really taciturn and reticent, and they don't really like to talk about the past. — Adrian McKinty

I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew - people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don't remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week. — Adrian McKinty

Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by J. R. R. Tolkien. — Adrian McKinty

When a locked-room mystery doesn't work, the solution makes you groan, and the book gets hurled across the room. — Adrian McKinty

I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master's in philosophy. — Adrian McKinty

I stuck on the lunchtime news. More riots. Tedious now. Depressing. You ever read Thucycdides? I'll boil him down for you in one easy moral: intergenerational war is a very bad thing. — Adrian McKinty

Don't worry, Duffy. I like you. We'll kill you last. — Adrian McKinty

Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.' — Adrian McKinty

Ireland in shades of black and green under the gibbous moon. Ireland under the canopy of grey cloud, under the crow's wing and the helicopter blade. A night ride over the Lagan valley and the bandit country of South Armagh. The music in my head was Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which opens with a hesitant syncopated motif evocative of Mahler's irregular heartbeat. — Adrian McKinty

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. — Adrian McKinty

I used to get a lift to school every day with a man who was a major in the British Army. — Adrian McKinty

This place was not like the Victorian Prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state;no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking. — Adrian McKinty

Forget him, he's just another red-shirted extra making a cameo appearance in our lives. — Adrian McKinty

A cocked .38 doesn't feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you. — Adrian McKinty

Revenge is the foolish stepbrother of justice. — Adrian McKinty

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. — Adrian McKinty

Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn't like that? — Adrian McKinty

A specific editor in a specific place likes the book, and you're in. A different editor on a different day goes, 'Oh, this isn't for me', or doesn't even look at it, and that's it. — Adrian McKinty

I was knocked down and dragged by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run. — Adrian McKinty

I don't know if that's a year's bad luck, or if that's how it works. But stealing a Christmas tree - that can't be a good thing, karma-wise. — Adrian McKinty

The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards, and if you think about it, it's the only one that's given for an entire continent. — Adrian McKinty

You painted it pink?' Price asked with a grin.
'That's lavender, you colour-blind eejit,' I said.
McCallister saw that Price clearly hadn't got the message yet. 'Hey lads, you know why Price nearly failed the police entrance exam? He thought a polygon was a dead parrot.'
The lads chuckled dutifully and somebody punched Price on the shoulder. — Adrian McKinty

The driver had on Radio 1, which was giving us Kylie Minogue's 'I should be so lucky'....By the song's second verse I was already longing for an IRA ambush and and by the second chorus I was dreaming of a rogue comet strike. — Adrian McKinty

You ever read Thucydides? I'll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing. — Adrian McKinty

But this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692 — Adrian McKinty

Radio One played "Ebony and Ivory," a new song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The breakfast DJ Mike Read played it two times in a row which was pretty hardcore of him as it was clearly the worst song of the decade so far, perhaps of the entire century. — Adrian McKinty

Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location. — Adrian McKinty

The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket. — Adrian McKinty

My friend you must understand that time forks perpetually into countless futures. And in at least one of them I have become your enemy. Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) — Adrian McKinty

If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world. — Adrian McKinty

A bullet in the head will fix an incipient asthma attack every time. — Adrian McKinty

In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way. — Adrian McKinty

A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators. — Adrian McKinty

Greek mythology has always been my Achilles elbow. — Adrian McKinty

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. — Adrian McKinty

On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located. — Adrian McKinty

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain. — Adrian McKinty

I met my wife in Oxford, fell in love with her, and followed her to New York. I was an illegal there for the first few years, until we got married, so I ended up doing lots of interesting jobs, some for a few days, some for a few months. — Adrian McKinty

A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone,' in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican's daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered. — Adrian McKinty

The Bible says that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Well, trouble followed me like sharks trailing a slave ship. Even when I tried to get away it was there swirling in a vortex around me. — Adrian McKinty

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.' — Adrian McKinty

The problem with Double Fantasy was the arrangement whereby they alternated John Lennon tracks with Yoko Ono tracks. You couldn't escape Yoko for more than four minutes at a time. — Adrian McKinty

I had gone to New York with no plan at all. I did a lot of jobs - barman, teacher, security guard, postman and construction worker - and I was meeting many eccentric characters, and they were saying funny things, which I always wrote down. — Adrian McKinty

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them. — Adrian McKinty

'The Man in the High Castle' is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel. — Adrian McKinty

You're a glass-half-empty kind of guy, sir, aren't you?"
"I don't even acknowledge the existence of the glass, son. — Adrian McKinty

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension. — Adrian McKinty

I find it easier to write in the winter in Melbourne. When the weather is good you want to go out for a walk, ride a bike, go to a cafe or something. When it's raining, when it's a miserable day, I just sit down at my desk and get some work done. — Adrian McKinty

Intelligence is no substitute for wisdom. Live long enough to get wise, eh? — Adrian McKinty

We drank our whiskeys. It was the good stuff and it tasted of salt, sea, rain, wind and the Old Testament. — Adrian McKinty

We were living in Denver, Colorado, and I was teaching high school. I asked the kids to write a short story, so I thought I should write some myself. — Adrian McKinty