Top 35 Benjamin Stevenson Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Call me a reliable narrator. Everything I tell you will be the truth, or, at least, the truth as I knew it to be at the time that I thought I knew it.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

2. “But I promised to be reliable, not competent.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

3. “But a bad person who thinks they’re a good one – now, that’s what got him into trouble.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

4. “Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

5. “Owe, owe, owe. You use that word so much. A family is not a credit card.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

6. “Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

7. “If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

8. “You want the difference between pulp and literature? Between a real writer and just a writer? I’ll tell you: adverbs.” “Adverbs?” “You use too many of them,” he said, derisively.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

9. “I’m sorry about before,” I said. Seeing as we were shoulder to shoulder, I spoke outwards, lobbing my apology into the void of the mountain. It’s the only way blokes know how to show humility, by pretending we’re at a urinal.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

10. “Silence is a tap left running: it fills and fills until it overflows and becomes insurmountable.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

11. “I pegged him as a country cop who’d spent most of his career with his feet on the desk or giving tourists like Lucy speeding tickets. He seemed more annoyed to have been pulled from his comfortable day than interested in the corpse.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

12. “I’d been so desperate to make a family, to force Erin to make me one, that I’d forgotten the one that had formed around me. Family is gravity. I realized then what Sofia had told me back at the very start of all this. Family is not whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

13. “There is only one plot hole you could drive a truck through.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

14. “You read people’s books, and you think you know them. They’re having a conversation with you for hundreds of pages, and there’s an intimacy there that you develop on your own.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

15. “Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

16. “A bunch of writers in a room requires a collective noun that the English language doesn’t have. A condolence, perhaps. A sympathy. It’s a war hospital for the written word.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

17. “I am normally resolute in declining any invitation that comes with an Excel spreadsheet attached.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

18. “The wind was cruel; it found every crevasse in my clothes, invaded and patted me down like I owed it money.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

19. “We used to send the insane to the mountains while we stayed in the cities. Now the cities drive us insane and we try to escape to the mountains.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

20. “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God? – Membership oath of the Detection Club, 1930, a secret society of mystery writers including Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and Dorothy L. Sayers.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

21. “Mystery writers these days always have to find a way to take away their crime-solvers’ phones because otherwise the reader sits there the whole time thinking, Google it!”

— Benjamin Stevenson

22. “People are generally less likeable the more you get to know them. I certainly am.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

23. “Christopher stepped back as I cracked open the door. “You really think that device killed Rylan?” he asked. “It was just a piece of paper.” “So’s the Declaration of Independence. The Bible. Paper’s killed more people than any blade.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

24. “We are seven chapters away from the next death.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

25. “I was tempted to type in “How do I call my uncle an idiot but make it sound constructive?” But I didn’t think AI would have the plethora of curse words I required.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

26. “Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

27. “It’s not the writing that tells the story, it’s the reading.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

28. “Anger is as much an heirloom as any Rolex.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

29. “It’s not the writing that tells the story, it’s the reading. Words on a page aren’t a legacy until they’re read.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

30. “Andy didn’t need to say aloud what I’d written under “Next of kin” – It’s a family reunion, so anyone here, unless Avalanche.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

31. “Family is gravity.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

32. “This works to spoil films too: the highest-profile actor with the fewest lines is always the villain, and a sudden wide-shot of a character crossing a road means they are about to be hit by a car. A good author must not only wrong-foot the reader within the narrative, they must do it within the form of the novel itself. There are clues baked into the very object.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

33. “You can tell a lot about someone from whether they can handle an uncomfortable silence. If they ride it out or snap it off.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

34. “One day you’ll realize family isn’t about whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.”

— Benjamin Stevenson

35. “We haven’t met properly,” I said, as she threaded me through housekeeping carts vomiting fluffy white towels. “People call me Ern.” “As in, cremated?” “It’s short for Ernest.”

— Benjamin Stevenson