Top 120 Jeffery Deaver Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that’s the easy part.”

— Jeffery Deaver

2. “Everything in the past is memory and everything in the future is imagination. Those’re both illusions – memories are unreliable and we just speculate about the future. The only thing that’s completely real is this one instant of the present – and that’s constantly changing from imagination to memory. So, see? Most of our life’s illusory.”

— Jeffery Deaver

3. “But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.”

— Jeffery Deaver

4. “Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.”

— Jeffery Deaver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

5. “The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire.”

— Jeffery Deaver

6. “Throat clutching from the outset! The Never List stands as a sterling example of psychological thriller writing at its best. Cancel appointments and give up on sleep. It’s that kind of book.”

— Jeffery Deaver

7. “Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.”

— Jeffery Deaver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

8. “I also try very hard to create characters – both heroes and villains – with psychological depth.”

— Jeffery Deaver

9. “It’s a tough life, she’d said. “It’s the little things that get us through the day.”

— Jeffery Deaver

10. “Yield and you need not break. Bent, you can straighten. Emptied, you can hold. Torn, you can mend.”

— Jeffery Deaver

11. “Whatever else you could say about Jason Westerfield, grass didn’t grow under the man’s feet. A.”

— Jeffery Deaver

12. “It’s becoming apparent that I like bad boys. That’s one of my problems. They’ve all been bad boys. You’re one too. You’re a bad boy. But, I think you’re a good bad boy.”

— Jeffery Deaver

13. “And life changes. Maybe just a little, maybe a lot. And at some point, it just isn’t worth the fight to fix it.”

— Jeffery Deaver

14. “This only is denied the Gods: the power to remake the past. – ARISTOTLE.”

— Jeffery Deaver

15. “I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.”

— Jeffery Deaver

16. “But one does not make living writing poetry unless you’re a professor, and one frankly doesn’t get a lot of girls as a poet.”

— Jeffery Deaver

17. “Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.”

— Jeffery Deaver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “I’m really not the cold fish everyone thinks I am.”

— Jeffery Deaver

19. “Family is about love and affection but about friction and separation, too. Yet, with work and luck, the distances – geographic and emotional – can be shrunk, even made to vanish.”

— Jeffery Deaver

20. “But game theory only works when the rules are clearly set out ahead of time. In the Nash bargaining game here, neither of the players was aware of another rule presently at work: that what they were bargaining over – me – might be a player in the game too. As.”

— Jeffery Deaver

21. “I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.”

— Jeffery Deaver

22. “When it comes time to write the book itself I’ll shut the lights out, picture the scene I’m about to write then close my eyes and go at it. Yes, I can touch type.”

— Jeffery Deaver

23. “So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.”

— Jeffery Deaver

24. “RIP, Rest in Peace, though what’s the point of that? What else’re the dead going to be doing? It’s a better message than Good Luck, don’t you think?”

— Jeffery Deaver

25. “Depression depleted your energy; the main cause of suicide was a deadly fusion of hopelessness, anxiety and panic.”

— Jeffery Deaver

26. “If you have a craftsman’s command of the language and basic writing techniques you’ll be able to write – as long as you know what you want to say.”

— Jeffery Deaver

27. “In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.”

— Jeffery Deaver

28. “I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.”

— Jeffery Deaver

29. “The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals – humanised animals – triumphs of vivisection.”

— Jeffery Deaver

30. “In general, I think, less is more, and that if a reader stops reading because a book is too icky then I’ve failed in my obligation to the readers.”

— Jeffery Deaver

Featured in: Reading Quotes

31. “When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.”

— Jeffery Deaver

32. “I’m not your proverbial worst nightmare because nightmares aren’t real and I am more real than anybody wants to admit.”

— Jeffery Deaver

33. “Playing chess or Go or Tigris and Euphrates – a very good game, by the way – I can watch people as they choose their strategy and note how they respond to something I’ve done. Even.”

— Jeffery Deaver

34. “My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don’t populate them with characters that readers can care about.”

— Jeffery Deaver

35. “Too much screaming in Congress. Too much screaming everywhere.”

— Jeffery Deaver

36. “Henry Loving stimulates the amnesia gene. But it’s also true most people are simply extremely unobservant. Freddy.”

— Jeffery Deaver

37. “I’ve often said that there’s no such thing as writer’s block, the problem is idea block.”

— Jeffery Deaver

38. “People want to avoid the past. I suppose that’s natural. When we tally up all we’ve said and done over the years, despite the wonderful memories, the regrets may be fewer but stand out more prominently, glowing coals that we can never quite extinguish, try though we might.”

— Jeffery Deaver

39. “That’s the past for you. Not only does it come back at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, times but it’s set in stone.”

— Jeffery Deaver

40. “Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there’s yet another surprise.”

— Jeffery Deaver

41. “You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.”

— Jeffery Deaver

42. “Rhyme’s eyes closed. His head dipped. But only a few millimeters. As with most great men, Lincoln Rhyme’s gestures of defeat were very subtle.”

— Jeffery Deaver

43. “We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets – and oh how we squander those moments.”

— Jeffery Deaver

44. “I pressed the ignition button and the engine came to life. Our cars have special mufflers to deaden the exhaust sound but there’s nothing you can do about a starter. Carter.”

— Jeffery Deaver

45. “Never kill an animal but for three reasons: for food or hide, for defense, for mercy.”

— Jeffery Deaver

46. “The best part about Omar was that he wasn’t simply a decoy. Surrounding the robot was a grid of ultraviolet and microwave beams. When Loving or his partner, presumably from some distance, took up position and fired the typical three-burst round into Omar’s head, empty and inexpensively replaceable, a computer would instantly correlate trajectory, speed and GPS coordinates and indicate on our handhelds where the shooter was, down to three feet. Would.”

— Jeffery Deaver

47. “You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There’s no mystery. But you put a thousand times more effort into raising your child and the result is the opposite of what you hope and dream for. This seemed so unfair.”

— Jeffery Deaver

48. “She believed not in divine salvation but in the proposition that we poor mortals are fully capable of saving ourselves, if conditions and inclinations are right, and the evidence of this potential is found in the smallest of gestures, like the uncertain resting of a large hand on a bony shoulder.”

— Jeffery Deaver

49. “Curiously, while drone operators are perhaps the safest of all combat troops physically, they have among the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress in the military and national security services. Sitting at a video console in Colorado or New York City, killing someone six thousand miles away and then collecting the kids at gymnastics or football practice, having dinner and sitting down to watch Dancing with the Stars in your suburban den was disorienting beyond belief.”

— Jeffery Deaver

50. “Time transcends morality.”

— Jeffery Deaver