Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It’s always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.”

— Lee Child

52. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. He thought JFK had said it. I thought it was actually Friedrich Nietzsche, and he said destroy, not kill. What doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger.”

— Lee Child

53. “Waste not, want not, make do and mend, don’t make an exhibition of yourself.”

— Lee Child

54. “The key to thrillers is vicarious pleasure.”

— Lee Child

55. “I love Italian food but that’s too generic a term for what’s available now: you have to narrow it down to Tuscan, Sicilian, and so on.”

— Lee Child

56. “Reacher said Nothing.”

— Lee Child

57. “I grew up in Birmingham, where they made useful things and made them well.”

— Lee Child

58. “I’ve got everything I need. That’s the definition of affluence.”

— Lee Child

59. “I never volunteer for anything,” I said. “Soldier’s basic rule.”

— Lee Child

60. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

— Lee Child

61. “I have the ‘thing’ worked out – the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.”

— Lee Child

62. “I’m not really into gourmet food; I’m the kind of guy who just stops by a place that looks good rather than heading for the restaurant of the moment.”

— Lee Child

63. “I have to warn you. I promised my mother, a long time ago. She said I had to give folks a chance to walk away.”

— Lee Child

64. “They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren’t ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because nobody noticed.”

— Lee Child

65. “So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book – driven by some very real feelings of desperation – and it worked.”

— Lee Child

66. “I was fired from my television job, simple as that. Well, downsized, really, a classic 1990s situation.”

— Lee Child

67. “I had been coming to America very frequently for many, many years, so I had plenty of exposure – and maybe the best kind of exposure, because I think first impressions are very important. Maybe I notice stuff that is just subliminal to people who live here all the time.”

— Lee Child

68. “British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography.”

— Lee Child

69. “The British regulatory system was revised, so that bigger profits were encouraged, which removed the option of big spending on programming. Quality just fell off a cliff, and all the old hands either left or were fired for being too expensive.”

— Lee Child

70. “The third guy was different. He was what you got when you ate squirrels for four generations. Smarter than a rat and tougher than a goat, and jumpier than either one.”

— Lee Child

71. “I always wanted to be in the world of entertainment. I just love the idea of an audience being happy with what I am doing. Writing is showbusiness for shy people. That’s how I see it.”

— Lee Child

72. “For me the end of a book is just as exciting as it is for a reader.”

— Lee Child

73. “Lone women shouldn’t stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.”

— Lee Child

74. “I like food, like any other guy, but it is not the main thing in my life. I can do without it.”

— Lee Child

75. “The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.”

— Lee Child

76. “Handguns were in-room weapons. Under expert control in high-pressure situations the average range for a successful engagement was about eleven feet.”

— Lee Child

77. “Chester Stone said nothing. Just stood up and threaded his way by all the furniture and over to the door. Through the reception area and into the corridor and into the elevator. Down eighty-eight floors and back outside, where the bright morning sun hit him in the face like a blow.”

— Lee Child

78. “Echo was a young girl in love with Narcissus. But he loved himself, not her, so she pined away until just her voice was left.”

— Lee Child

79. “Reacher smiled. Bad luck and trouble, been my only friends.”

— Lee Child

80. “Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you start criticizing him, you’re a mile away and he’s got to run after you in his socks.” – Jack Reacher.”

— Lee Child

81. “My name is Jack Reacher, and once I was a military cop, with heavy emphasis on the past tense. I have been out nearly as long as I was in. But old habits die hard. I had stepped into the bar the same way I always step anywhere, which is carefully.”

— Lee Child

82. “Alaska Airlines would have been cheaper, but Reacher hated Alaska Airlines. They put a scripture card on their meal trays. Ruined his appetite.”

— Lee Child

83. “People that thin are usually rich. We live in strange times. Poor people are fat, and rich people are thin.”

— Lee Child

84. “People live, and then they die. And as long as they do both things properly, there’s nothing much to regret”.”

— Lee Child

85. “The M1A1 Abrams is like a shark, evolved to a point of absolute perfection. It is the undisputed king of the jungle. No other tank on earth can even begin to damage it. It is wrapped in armor made out of a depleted uranium core sandwiched between rolled steel plate. The armor is dense and impregnable.”

— Lee Child

86. “First: Character is king. There are probably fewer than six books every century remembered specifically for their plots. People remember characters. Same with television. Who remembers the Lone Ranger? Everybody. Who remembers any actual Lone Ranger story lines? Nobody.”

— Lee Child

87. “No one expects a head butt. Humans don’t hit things with their heads. Some inbuilt atavistic instinct says so. A head butt changes the game. It adds a kind of unhinged savagery to the mix. An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight.”

— Lee Child

88. “No particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there.”

— Lee Child

89. “The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.”

— Lee Child

90. “On his day of demobilization a lugubrious one-armed, one-eyed brigadier wished him well and then added, apropos of nothing, “Mark my words, Moutier, a great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.”

— Lee Child

91. “Waiting is a skill like anything else.”

— Lee Child

92. “Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.’” Alice.”

— Lee Child

93. “People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Suppose you knew the winning numbers for the lottery? All of them? Not guessed them, not dreamed them, but really knew them? What would you do? You would run to the store, is what. You would mark those numbers on the playslip. And you would win.”

— Lee Child

94. “An under-window HVAC unit could be opened up, and nine times out of ten there was a plastic pocket expressly designed to hold paperwork, often an instruction manual or a warranty card, among which an enterprising person could conceal dozens of pages.”

— Lee Child

95. “Ninety percent of asking questions is about listening to answers.”

— Lee Child

96. “Reacher said nothing. We can’t fight thirty people. To which Reacher’s natural response was: Why the hell not?”

— Lee Child

97. “She said, “You say no one ever is sure what to expect. On either side. Which is a good thing. It means the game goes to the fastest thinker. That’s all I need to be.” “Correct,” I said. “Weird things are going to happen, and things are going to change, and the ground is going to move under our feet, but if we keep on thinking fast, we’ll be OK.”

— Lee Child

98. “I want you to swallow your tongue. I want you to just gulp it down, real sudden, like it was an oyster.”

— Lee Child

99. “We don’t teach them to fight fair, and we don’t start a fight.”

— Lee Child

100. “That should be your town motto. It’s all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now.”

— Lee Child