Joe Abercrombie

“If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same o...”

“The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.”

“Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.”

“Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.”

“He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think...”

“Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.”

“Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.”

“You are too full of your own hopes to hold anyone else's.”

“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”

“All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria. But there I wa...”

“Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.”

“One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we...”

“As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.”

“I just think TV is becoming more and more interesting in a way. Films are more and more derivative, you know, whether it's 'Transformers 2' or 'Shrek 5', or it's yet another iteration of ano...”