Top 50 Andrew Vachss Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s the family you choose that counts.”

— Andrew Vachss

2. “When you hunt predators, the best camouflage is weakness.”

— Andrew Vachss

3. “Journalism is what maintains democracy. It’s the force for progressive social change.”

— Andrew Vachss

4. “The worst place to be is in the middle. When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.”

— Andrew Vachss

5. “Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That’s why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.”

— Andrew Vachss

6. “Children know the truth: love is not an emotion, love is behavior.”

— Andrew Vachss

7. “Even if sheep could talk, they’d never ask questions.”

— Andrew Vachss

8. “Cats are the lap-dancers of the animal world. Soon as you stop shelling out, they move on, find another lap. They’re furry little sociopaths. Pretty and slick – in love with themselves. When’s the last time you saw a seeing-eye cat?”

— Andrew Vachss

9. “People are pushing against the fabric of society all the time.”

— Andrew Vachss

10. “A free press doesn’t mean it’s not a tame press.”

— Andrew Vachss

11. “I want to disabuse people of the idea that knowledge is power. Knowing how to get to Detroit is not the same thing as having the bus fare.”

— Andrew Vachss

12. “Information is the hardest currency.”

— Andrew Vachss

13. “A kid in an abusive home has far fewer rights than any POW. There is no Geneva Convention for kids.”

— Andrew Vachss

14. “I’m in pursuit of what cannot be achieved: perfection.”

— Andrew Vachss

15. “If love would die along with death, this life wouldn’t be so hard.”

— Andrew Vachss

16. “The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.”

— Andrew Vachss

17. “Evil is a matter of choice. Those people who have been victimized and refuse to imitate their oppressors are in my mind the greatest heroes we have.”

— Andrew Vachss

18. “Building a mechanical device for its appearance is like putting lace on a bowling ball.”

— Andrew Vachss

19. “From the very second that two people sat together around a fire in the forest, there was another human out there who felt better in the dark.”

— Andrew Vachss

20. “Stealing to eat ain’t criminal – stealing to be rich is.”

— Andrew Vachss

21. “Most investigators don’t even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they’d ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.”

— Andrew Vachss

22. “Roots are nice, but a tree can’t run.”

— Andrew Vachss

23. “The more bullets flying, the less accurate each individual slug has to be.”

— Andrew Vachss

24. “I don’t understand people whose gratification is a BMW. You don’t know what joy is until you see a kid who was tortured get adopted by a family.”

— Andrew Vachss

25. “A dog is like a person – he needs a job and a family to be what he’s meant to be.”

— Andrew Vachss

26. “The goal of a true family is not that their children follow in their footsteps, but that their children surpass them in all ways.”

— Andrew Vachss

27. “People who don’t have much get ugly about giving up the little they have left.”

— Andrew Vachss

28. “A moral society will not set standards for becoming a parent, but it will establish irreducible minimums for maintaining that sacred status.”

— Andrew Vachss

29. “Fear is an enemy that can be killed only at close range. The closest range of all is intimacy. The deeper the fear is embedded in one’s spirit, the more vulnerable it is.”

— Andrew Vachss

30. “I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I’m not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.”

— Andrew Vachss

31. “Two rules: You enter without breaking. And you remember that nobody misses what you don’t take.”

— Andrew Vachss

32. “Victimizers of children are the enemies of any so-called society.”

— Andrew Vachss

33. “The Bowery station on the J line is what happens to a neighborhood once politicians realize the people who live there don’t vote.”

— Andrew Vachss

34. “I think people should be consumers of journalism.”

— Andrew Vachss

35. “Max Allan Collins blends fact and fiction like no other writer.”

— Andrew Vachss

36. “He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.”

— Andrew Vachss

37. “The idea that you’re not a writer until you’re published is a lie.”

— Andrew Vachss

38. “I don’t sign contracts for my books.”

— Andrew Vachss

39. “People won’t let you live the way you want to, but if you’re strong enough or quick enough, at least you don’t have to live the way they want you to.”

— Andrew Vachss

40. “Camouflage doesn’t help when the other guy is willing to defoliate the whole jungle.”

— Andrew Vachss

41. “If you can’t be counted on, you won’t be counted in.”

— Andrew Vachss

42. “No politician is threatened by the child protective constituency, because it does not exist.”

— Andrew Vachss

43. “The maltreated child cries ‘I hurt.’ Unheard or unheeded, that cry becomes prophecy.”

— Andrew Vachss

44. “Biology does not make a man a father – nor a woman a mother. We are what we do.”

— Andrew Vachss

45. “The Humane Society of America thinks Michael Vick should have a dog. I think whoever’s in charge there should have a lobotomy.”

— Andrew Vachss

46. “Perfection cannot be achieved by men,” he told me. “Our highest calling is the pursuit of perfection. My haiku will be finished when I die, but it will never be perfect.”

— Andrew Vachss

47. “Your Honor,” Blumberg rang out, “every dog must have his day!” And he got perhaps the first standing ovation ever given in New York City night court.”

— Andrew Vachss

48. “I have learned that a man who counts himself a shepherd is not worthy to be a member of a flock.”

— Andrew Vachss

49. “He had the radio turned to some Spanish-language station at a volume that reminded me of the holding tank at Riker’s Island – and for an added touch of authenticity he screamed ‘Maricon!’ and waved his fist out the open window at another driver who had the audacity to attempt to share the road with us.”

— Andrew Vachss

50. “Pervasive abuse and neglect of children is a greater danger to our species than cocaine and Communism combined.”

— Andrew Vachss