Top 200 Anthony Horowitz Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “If I were of a philosophical frame of mind I might wonder to what extent any one of us is in control of our own destiny, or if indeed we can ever predict the far-reaching consequences of actions which, at the time, may seem entirely trivial.”

— Anthony Horowitz

152. “Abbiatico and Salvinelli,” he said. “It cost me thirty grand – or my mother, anyway.”

— Anthony Horowitz

153. “But he was a man without a shadow – or perhaps a shadow without a man.”

— Anthony Horowitz

154. “In just about every other book I can think of, we’re chasing on the heels of our heroes – the spies, the soldiers, the romantics, the adventurers. But we stand shoulder to shoulder with the detective.”

— Anthony Horowitz

155. “Alan invented all sorts of ways of expressing things so that only he and I understood. He used language as a place for us to hide.”

— Anthony Horowitz

156. “Alex listened as the two men argued, neither really listening to what the other had to say. So this was how the government worked!”

— Anthony Horowitz

157. “Hawthorne certainly had a magnetic personality. Although, of course, magnets can repel as well as attract.”

— Anthony Horowitz

158. “My greatest fear is disappointing the reader, so each book has to be better than the one before.”

— Anthony Horowitz

159. “Why does anyone take photographs ever? We never look at them anymore.”

— Anthony Horowitz

160. “It is, of course, traditional in children’s literature to get rid of the parents.”

— Anthony Horowitz

161. “The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I’m not making any judgement. It’s just the sort of thing I can’t help but notice.”

— Anthony Horowitz

162. “And what of the vicar? The word sat at the top of the page, underlined. That would suggest some sort of operation involving religion, but frankly, church was the last place you would expect to find anyone from Scorpia.”

— Anthony Horowitz

163. “And here, out in the darkness, identical twins were stalking each other, one of them with murder on his mind.”

— Anthony Horowitz

164. “Blunt. I am the chief executive of the Special Operations Division of MI6. And your uncle was, for want of a better word, a spy.”

— Anthony Horowitz

165. “I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.”

— Anthony Horowitz

166. “I had received an answer to the question that Holmes had put to me. Now all I needed to know was why I had asked it.”

— Anthony Horowitz

167. “I vividly remember being 14. That was the age when I started to get happy: I started being a writer and stopped being a loser.”

— Anthony Horowitz

168. “It’s strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery? And what is it that attracts us? The crime, or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable?”

— Anthony Horowitz

169. “It was the garden of a man who wanted to rule the world but couldn’t, and so had cut the world down to his own size.”

— Anthony Horowitz

170. “My writing has always been what you call ‘narrative fiction’ in the sense that it’s got very strong plots and twists at the end.”

— Anthony Horowitz

Featured in: Strong Quotes

171. “When are you at your most defenseless?”

— Anthony Horowitz

172. “You must know that feeling when it’s raining outside and the heating’s on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book.”

— Anthony Horowitz

173. “It was quite elementary,′ returned the detective with a languid gesture of one hand.”

— Anthony Horowitz

174. “Statues lined the stairs and stood, dotted across the roof. But they had been brutalized by time and the weather. Some were missing arms. Many had no faces. Once they had been saints and angels. Two hundred years standing in London had turned them into cripples.”

— Anthony Horowitz

175. “It felt strange. I was about to read one murder mystery while sitting inside another.”

— Anthony Horowitz

176. “It has always struck me that any interpretation of a series of events is possible until all the evidence says otherwise and even then one should be wary before jumping to a conclusion.”

— Anthony Horowitz

177. “What makes them dangerous is their belief that they should not be stopped, that they are justified in what they do. I will not speak of my experiences in the war, but I will say this. The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.”

— Anthony Horowitz

178. “The food at the Mandarin Club was not good, but the members liked it that way. It reminded them of school.”

— Anthony Horowitz

179. “I held out the packet and suddenly we were friends. That’s one of the only good things about being a smoker these days. You’re part of a persecuted minority. You bond easily.”

— Anthony Horowitz

180. “I took the train to New York and it is hard to convey to you my first impressions as I left Grand Central Depot. I found myself in a city of extraordinary opulence and abject poverty, of astonishing elegance and extreme depravity, the two living so close by that I only had to turn my head to pass from one to the other.”

— Anthony Horowitz

181. “Atticus Pund did not reply but he knew from his experience that murderers could, indeed, smile and make pleasant conversation one minute and strike violently the next. His experiences during the war had also taught him much about what he called the institutionalisation of murder; how, if you surrounded murder with enough forms and procedures, if you could convince yourself that it was an absolute necessity, then ultimately it would not be murder at all.”

— Anthony Horowitz

182. “McCain might have suffered hardships in his life, but what had happened to him had nothing to do with his background or his color; they were convenient excuses now. He had been a psychopath from the start.”

— Anthony Horowitz

183. “I warned you that danger can become a drug and it seems to me that in your case, it’s too late. You’re already hooked.”

— Anthony Horowitz

184. “Ban Nab. It’s a palindrome.’ He said nothing, so I added: ‘It reads the same forwards and backwards.’ ‘Do geese see God?’ Hawthorne asked.”

— Anthony Horowitz

185. “If you’ve ever read the French philosopher Alain Badiou, you’ll know that he defines jokes as a type of rupture that opens up truths.”

— Anthony Horowitz

186. “There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can’t be all bad.”

— Anthony Horowitz

187. “Somehow, she was always there when you needed her. The trouble was, she was also there when you didn’t.”

— Anthony Horowitz

188. “One car behind him. Two more ahead. The plane was now in.”

— Anthony Horowitz

189. “It seemed that there was nothing you could find here that was not expensive and very little that was actually necessary.”

— Anthony Horowitz

190. “These people... I’ve never come across anyone like them. You want the truth? They make Scorpia look like a vicar’s tea party.”

— Anthony Horowitz

191. “The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.”

— Anthony Horowitz

192. “And I can absolutely see her beating someone to death because she was annoyed with them. Mind you, she’d probably torture them first by reading them one of her poems.”

— Anthony Horowitz

193. “Life may imitate art – but it usually falls short of it.”

— Anthony Horowitz

194. “He had an extraordinary presence that could be saturnine, threatening or magnetic, depending on his mood.”

— Anthony Horowitz

195. “It’s a simple fact of life that a clever private detective needs a much less clever police officer in much the same way as a photograph needs both light and darkness.”

— Anthony Horowitz

196. “Do geese see God?”

— Anthony Horowitz

197. “I don’t know how anyone can tell them apart. They even wear the same clothes all the time, which is a bit creepy.”

— Anthony Horowitz

198. “He wasn’t being deliberately offensive. It was just that offensive was his default mode.”

— Anthony Horowitz

199. “I thought most kids would give their right arm to go into outer space,” Shulsky added unhelpfully. “Haven’t you ever dreamt about becoming an astronaut?” “No,” Alex said. “I always wanted to be a train driver.”

— Anthony Horowitz

200. “I’ve made some tea,’ Judith Matheson said. Of course she had. She was the sort of woman who would always make tea no matter what the crisis. Lose your leg in a hideous industrial accident and she’d be there with a nice cup of Earl Grey.”

— Anthony Horowitz