Top 200 Anthony Horowitz Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 5

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

— Anthony Horowitz

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

155. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

163. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

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

— Anthony Horowitz

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

172. “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

173. “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

174. “The grieving widow,’ Hawthorne muttered. ‘Do you think so?’ ‘No, Tony. I’ve seen more grief at a Turkish wedding. If you ask me, I’d say there’s a lot of things she’s not telling.”

— Anthony Horowitz

175. “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

176. “When people keep secrets, those secrets have a nasty way of festering. They can turn into poison. They can kill.”

— Anthony Horowitz

177. “He saved my life. In a way, I loved him. I love you too, Alex. You are so very much like him. I’m glad that you’re here with me now.”

— Anthony Horowitz

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

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

— Anthony Horowitz

187. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

189. “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

190. “Do geese see God?”

— Anthony Horowitz

191. “That’s why life is so different to fiction. Every day is a single page and you have no chance to thumb forward and see what lies ahead.”

— Anthony Horowitz

192. “As a rule, I don’t go to funerals. I find them too horrible and upsetting and the older I get, of course, the more invitations I receive. As a favour to my friends, I’ll make sure that none of them are told the date of mine.”

— Anthony Horowitz

193. “I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.”

— Anthony Horowitz

194. “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

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

— Anthony Horowitz

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

— Anthony Horowitz

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

— Anthony Horowitz

198. “Adrian Lockwood was the sort of man who was hard to dislike although he was doing everything he could to help us on our way.”

— Anthony Horowitz

199. “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

200. “It’s easy enough to change your personality, to become evil. The trouble is, it stays with you. And it damages you.”

— Anthony Horowitz