Lee Child Quotes & Sayings

But the kid could think, too. He wasn't academic like Joe, but he was practical. His IQ was probably about the same, but it was a get-the-job-done type of street smart IQ, not any kind of for-the-sake-of-it cerebral indulgence. Reacher liked facts, for sure, and information too, but not theory. He was a real-world character. Stan had no idea what the future held for the guy. No idea at all, except he was going to be too big to fit inside a tank or an airplane cockpit. So it was going to have to be something else. — Lee Child

I'm not really into gourmet food; I'm the kind of guy who just stops by a place that looks good rather than heading for the restaurant of the moment. — Lee Child

Do it once and do it right and do it quickly — Lee Child

The guy offered his left fist. Reacher bumped it with his right, behind DeLong's back. Not the first time his knuckles had touched a Sox fan, but by far the gentlest. — Lee Child

So he died, because for a split-second he got brave. But not then. He died much later, after the split-second of bravery had faded into long hours of wretched gasping fear, and after the long hours of fear had exploded into long minutes of insane screaming panic. — Lee Child

Hence 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect. — Lee Child

Reacher prowled the hallway, his gun stiff-armed way out in front of him, his torso jerking violently left and right from the hips, like a crazy disco dance. The house-storming shuffle. — Lee Child

He was keeping track of time. It was nearly two hours since he had last looked at his watch, but he knew what time it was to within about twenty seconds. It was an old skill, born of many long wakeful nights on active service. When you're waiting for something to happen, you close your body down like a beach house in winter and you let your mind lock onto the steady pace of the passing seconds. It's like suspended animation. It saves energy and it lifts the responsibility for your heartbeat away from your unconscious brain and passes it on to some kind of a hidden clock. Makes a huge black space for thinking in. But it keeps you just awake enough to be reach for whatever you need to be ready for. And it means you always know what time it is. — Lee Child

Then what I know now. Which phrase is used a lot. — Lee Child

I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff's office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman's voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless. — Lee Child

For me the end of a book is just as exciting as it is for a reader. — Lee Child

Life is endlessly capable of surprises, so he knew one day he would come face to face with his physical equal. With somebody who might worry him. But he looked and saw this wasn't the day. So he just smiled and looked away again. — Lee Child

Attacking me was like pushing open a forbidden door. What waited on the other side was his problem. — Lee Child

London has a quarter of the whole world's supply of closed circuit cameras, all in one city. — Lee Child

How old are these — Lee Child

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked. — Lee Child

Chang said, "I don't understand how you drink so much coffee." "Law of gravity," Reacher said. "If you tip it up, it comes right out. You can't help but drink it. — Lee Child

The dawn came up entirely gold, with no hint of pink or purple. The sky was a rinsed blue, like an old shirt washed a thousand times. — Lee Child

People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do. — Lee Child

If in doubt, say nothing. — Lee Child

In LA she would hole up. Back in the day it had been part of his job to find people, and he had been pretty good at it. Success depended on — Lee Child

War isn't about dying for your country. It's about making the enemy die for his. Gen. George S. Patton — Lee Child

The grounds had an iron fence set in a stone knee wall, which was just wide enough for a small person to sit on, and Turner was a small person, and Reacher was used to being uncomfortable. — Lee Child

completely deserted. — Lee Child

She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory. — Lee Child

He had a choice,' I said. 'He could have spent his days helping old ladies across the street. He could have volunteered in the library. I expect they have a library here. He could have raised funds for Africa, or wherever they need funds these days. He could have done a whole lot of good things. But he didn't. He chose not to. He chose to spend his days extorting money and hurting people. Then finally he opened the wrong door, and what came out at him was his problem, not mine. Plus he was useless. A waste of good food. Too stupid to live.'
'Stupidity isn't a capital crime. And there's no death penalty here, anyway.'
'There is now. — Lee Child

Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Calvin Franz, Frances Neagley, Stanley Lowrey, Manuel Orozco, David O'Donnell, and Karla Dixon. — Lee Child

Cops are the same the world over. I know, because I was one, and I met plenty of others. Including here. This is not a different country when it comes to cops." "Maybe that's what they call their ID here." "I think they call it a warrant card." "Which he knew we wouldn't understand. So he used different words." "He would have said, I'm a police officer, and I'm going to put my hand in my pocket very slowly and show you ID. Or my ID. Or identification. Or credentials. Or something. But the word police would have been in there somewhere, for damn sure, and the word government would not have been, equally for damn sure. — Lee Child

Never hit a woman unless she's trying to kill you. — Lee Child

He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it. — Lee Child

You think you've been in deep shit before, and then you realise you have absolutely no conception of how deep shit can really be. — Lee Child

So I got desperate. I was really panicking. Then I got this idea. I figured if I looked at people hitching rides, I might find somebody. One of them might turn out to be the right type of person, and willing to help me. I tried to choose pretty carefully. I only stopped for rough-looking men. — Lee Child

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy's wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody's weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy's abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.
The doctor's wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face.
"What?" Reacher asked her. — Lee Child

I don't need validation, recognition or praise. What I need are facts and the facts are that one of my books gets sold, somewhere in the world, every second. — Lee Child

I need a stimulating environment to write because my books are driven at 100 miles per hour at a time. — Lee Child

He changed his final wad up at the train station. Which was a sad place now. There were homeless people and disturbed people hanging around. There were furtive men with swivel eyes, their hands thrust deep in capacious pockets. There was spray-can graffiti on the walls. Nothing compared to the South Bronx or inner-city Detroit or South-Central LA. But unusual for Germany. Reunification had been a strain. Economically, and socially. And mentally. He had watched it. Like living a comfortable life in a nice little house with your family. And then a whole bunch of relatives moves in. From someplace where they don't really know how to use a knife and fork. Ignorant and stunted people. But German like you. As if a brother had been taken away at birth and locked in a closet. Then in his mid-forties he comes stumbling out again, pale and hunched and blinking. A tough situation to manage. He — Lee Child

Based on Tor, which is what they all use. Which was written by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, ironically. To provide a safe haven for political dissidents and whistleblowers, all around the world. Which is the law of unintended consequences, right there, biting the world in the ass. Tor stands for The Onion Router. Because that's what we're dealing with here. Layers upon layers upon layers, like the layers of an onion, in the Deep Web itself, and inside all of its separate sites. — Lee Child

He had no bag, which was strange. But overall it was vaguely reassuring to have such a man on board, especially after he had proved himself civilized and not in any way threatening. Threatening behavior from a man that size would have been unseemly. Good manners from a man that size were charming. — Lee Child

Now you had one come back, Harley. — Lee Child

The guy who was standing said, "We don't want you here." Reacher said, "You're confusing me with someone who gives a shit what you want. — Lee Child

I've discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels. — Lee Child

The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today. — Lee Child

A small warehouse. Dark inside, against the bright daylight. Reacher walked closer. There was a sound inside. Fast wheezing breaths, bubbling and gurgling, each one ending in a tiny gasp or yelp. The sound of a guy breathing hard with broken ribs and blood in his throat. Reacher took his Colt out of his pocket. He clicked the safety. He put his finger on the trigger. He kept close to the wall, and tried to see in through the crack of the hinge. A big dark mass. He followed the angle of the left-hand door, and flattened his back against the last part of it. Neagley waited a yard away. She would replace him when he moved. He listened to the breathing. Wheezing, bubbling, yelping. He moved off the door and peered around its edge. He — Lee Child

Lowell's an odd duck," Peterson said. "He's a loner. He reads books. — Lee Child

I love visiting LA. It's an endlessly fascinating city, and is, of course, America's entertainment capital. Each time I go, I fall in love with it all over again. That said, it's not the sort of place I'd want to live. — Lee Child

Her breasts rested on the edge of the table. — Lee Child

You do not mess with the special investigators. — Lee Child

Street-fighting's first rule: there are no rules. — Lee Child

Life," Joe said. "What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it's over. Like it never happened at all." "We'll always remember her." "No, we'll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about. Therefore the rest already doesn't exist. As of now. — Lee Child

The Pentagon was built because World War Two was coming, and because World War Two was coming it was built without much steel. Steel was needed elsewhere, as always in wartime. Thus the giant building was a monument to the strength and mass of concrete. So much sand was needed for the mix it was dredged right out of the Potomac River, not far from the rising walls themselves. Nearly a million tons of it. The result was extreme solidity. — Lee Child

Some officers of his acquaintance had barked and yelled and shouted. He had always found it more effective to speak low and quiet, enunciating clearly and precisely as if to an idiot child, bearing down with an icy stare. That way he had found the implied menace to be unmistakable. — Lee Child

One day it seemed like a good idea, the next day it didn't. That kind of thing happened all the time, way back when, because strategy was fluid. Or because nobody had the faintest idea what they were doing. — Lee Child

He was close to Reacher's own height and weight, but slack and swollen, in a shirt as big as a circus tent, above a belt buckled improbably low, under a belly the size of a kettle drum. His face was pale, and his hair was colorless. — Lee Child

I'm not a vagrant. I'm a hobo. Big difference. — Lee Child

once in a pocket, a solid mechanical thrill — Lee Child

I like food, like any other guy, but it is not the main thing in my life. I can do without it. — Lee Child

One presenter was reporting on the fatal shooting of a suspected organized crime figure behind a downtown strip club, which involved much breathless speculation laid over meaningless pictures, mostly of the closed gate in the pink fence, above a ticker that said Moscow Comes to Phoenix, which Reacher figured would annoy Ukrainians everywhere, the two countries being entirely separate now, and proud of it, at least in one direction. — Lee Child

Griezman said, "Not literally, of course. He's obsessed about certain things, that's all. No doubt rooted in racist and xenophobic pathologies, and worsened by irrational fears. But otherwise he's quite normal. — Lee Child

A yard and left, Dave, he said. O'Donnell was like a blind man. His eyes were tight on the two guys — Lee Child

British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography. — Lee Child

The guy stood a yard inside the dark room and waited, blinking, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the hot whiteness of the Key West sun. It was June, dead-on four o'clock in the afternoon, the southernmost part of the United States. Way farther south than most of the Bahamas. A hot white sun and a fierce temperature. Reacher sat at his table in back and sipped water from a plastic bottle and waited. — Lee Child

Plan A is to hitch a ride out of here. But if they want a war, then plan B is to win it. — Lee Child

Writing is showbusiness for shy people. That's how I see it. — Lee Child

[Reacher] knew people with houses. He had talked to them, with the same kind of detached interest he would talk to a person who kept snakes as pets or entered ballroom dancing competitions. — Lee Child

What's the best place to hide a car? In an airport long-term lot. Like where's the best place to hide a grain of sand? On the beach — Lee Child

Try to look unimportant. They may be low on ammo. — Lee Child

Reacher looked at the books on the tables. He read when he could, mostly through the vast national library of lost and forgotten volumes. Battered paperbacks mostly, all curled and furry, found in waiting rooms or on buses, or on the porches of out-of-the-way motels, read and enjoyed and left somewhere else for the next guy. He liked fiction better than fact, because fact often wasn't. Like most people he knew a couple of things for sure, up close and eyeballed, and when he saw them in books they were wrong. So he liked made-up stories better, because everyone knew where they were from the get-go. He wasn't strict about genre. Either shit happened, or it didn't. Chang — Lee Child

The benches were magnificent. They could have been a hundred years old. They were made from solid mahogany, — Lee Child

Reacher got to them on the plane. He put them out of action and stole their wallets." "On the plane?" "He broke Lozano's fingers and Baldacci's arms and no one noticed." "That's not possible." "Apparently it is. One against two, on an airplane, with a hundred witnesses. It's a blatant humiliation. And now he's renting cars on our dime? Who does this guy think he is? — Lee Child

bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle. — Lee Child

California, Reacher thought. There was a sedan at the curb. It had been waiting there for them. A big car, black, expensive. The driver was leaning across and behind the front passenger seat. He was stretching over to pop the rear door. The guy opposite Reacher motioned with his gun again. Reacher didn't move. He glanced left and right. He figured he had about another second and a half to make some kind — Lee Child

He hauled the right-hand guy next to the left-hand guy, close together, shoulder to shoulder, and he picked up the heavy box like a strongman in the circus, struggling and tottering, and he took two short steps and dropped it on their heads from waist height.
Chrissie said, "Why did you do that?"
"Rules," Reacher said. "Winning ain't enough. The other guy has to know he lost. — Lee Child

A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give. Because of duty, and honor, and service. You understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward. — Lee Child

When did you last see him?" "About twenty minutes ago," I said. "In the morgue." Finlay nodded gently. "Before that?" "Seven years ago," I said. "Our mother's funeral. — Lee Child

No jokes, no banter. No pre-mission — Lee Child

Practically any Western has a homesteader in trouble, and a mysterious rider shows up off the range, solves the problem over two or three days, and then rides off into the sunset. — Lee Child

Short of a shotgun, a pool cue is the best barroom weapon ever invented. Short enough to be handy, long enough to be useful, made out of fine hardwood and nicely weighted with lead. — Lee Child

Our guns go from safe to single shot to full auto, which is nice and linear and logical, but they (Russians) knew that would mean ninety-nine times in a hundred their guys would panic and ram the selector all the way home, and thereby fire off a whole magazine on the first hasty and unaimed shot. Which would leave them with an empty weapon right at the start of a firefight. Which is not helpful. So the AK selector goes safe, then full auto, then single shot. Not linear, not logical, but certainly practical. Single shot is a kind of default setting, and full auto is a deliberate choice. — Lee Child

People who wear glasses, without them they always look unfocused, vulnerable. Out in the open. A layer removed. — Lee Child

I felt alienated by the experience and decided to stay away from corporate employment. — Lee Child

I can't worry about something I can't change. — Lee Child

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense. — Lee Child

The guy said, "We don't know if the somebody is a Chinaman. That information would have helped, I guess. — Lee Child

lifetime in the service was like rushing down a narrow corridor, eyes fixed firmly to the front. There was all kinds of enticing stuff off to the sides, which you rushed past and ignored. Now he wanted to take the side trips. He wanted a crazy zigzag, any direction he felt like, any old time he wanted. And returning to the same — Lee Child

On his day of demobilization a lugubrious one-armed, one-eyed brigadier wished him well and then added, apropos of nothing, Mark my words, Moutier, a great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. — Lee Child

When you've knocked someone unconscious, put him into the recovery position. If you want him to recover. — Lee Child

I'm not much to talk about. What you see is what you get. — Lee Child

They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal camera. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, and their steaming piles and pools of waste. Safe enough. — Lee Child

That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now. — Lee Child

He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with. — Lee Child

He had crashed through the barrier. He had stopped worrying and started relaxing. He was up on that plateau where you just did whatever needed doing. I knew that place. I lived there. — Lee Child

She pressed buttons and waited for answering beeps, and then she said, "I want the personnel jacket for U.S. Army Private First Class Wiley, first name unknown, currently four months absent without leave from an air defense unit in Germany. To me in Hamburg, seriously fast." Then she clicked off. The National Security Council. The keys to the kingdom. There was a knock at the door. For — Lee Child

Reacher said, "Our nearest tanks are a thousand miles from Yemen or Afghanistan, and they take weeks and weeks and thousands of people to move. It would be easier to bring Yemen or Afghanistan to them. Also faster and less obtrusive. — Lee Child

Don't worry about why it went wrong. Just damn well put it right. — Lee Child

Two men, I think. A driver and a passenger." Reacher didn't want to turn around to look. Didn't want to show either guy the pale flash of a concerned face in the rear window. So he hunched down a little and moved sideways until he could see the image in Chang's door mirror. A pick-up truck, about a hundred yards back. A Ford, he thought. A serious machine, big and obvious, keeping pace. It was dull red, like the general store. There were two guys in it, side by side, but far from each other, because of the vehicle's extravagant width. — Lee Child

He went up the metal stairs as quietly as he could, reducing the likely clang to a duller pulsing boom, by placing his feet very carefully. He found 214 and knocked on its door, firmly but discreetly, like he imagined a bellboy would, in a fine hotel. — Lee Child

I don't want to put the world to rights ... I just don't like people who put the world to wrongs. — Lee Child

Reacher said, So here's the thing Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I'll take it off your wrist. — Lee Child

Eventually a guy behind the hog farmer broke ranks, and stepped forward. A pragmatist, clearly. He walked to the car and lifted the hatchback and put the bags inside, one by one, first Keever's, then Chang's. — Lee Child

I'd been a thriller reader all my life. — Lee Child