Top 120 Richard Kadrey Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I guess I don’t have a choice.” “Of course you have a choice,” she says. “They’re just not very good choices.”

— Richard Kadrey

52. “God is the great janitor of the universe. Why things don’t work is that we have a janitor in charge, and we keep looking for the landlord.”

— Richard Kadrey

53. “The dead think they can get away with anything because you’ll feel sorry for them. If you play cards with the dead, make sure you deal and don’t let them buy you drinks. They’ll slip you a formaldehyde roofie and pry the gold fillings out of your teeth.”

— Richard Kadrey

54. “If Jesus was a bartender, He would still only be half as cool as Carlos.”

— Richard Kadrey

55. “In this life, no matter what anyone promises you, what allegiances of love or fealty they swear or what gods they pray to, you will never have more than what you have at this moment.”

— Richard Kadrey

56. “Let me make sure I have this straight. The cavalry just now rode into town and it’s a Czech Gypsy porn-star zombie killer. Have I got that right?”

— Richard Kadrey

57. “And his first name. Jeffrey spelled Geoffrey. Never trust a Geoffrey. Either they’re pretentious pricks or bitter that the family spelled their name funny.”

— Richard Kadrey

58. “I seldom feel trapped by my world. Setting up rules and restrictions is part of the process. It gives your world shape. I always look at these things like haiku: you have to work within certain parameters, but within them, you’re completely free.”

— Richard Kadrey

59. “Lions or tigers. They must be off somewhere waiting for the right moment to pounce. I like cats and don’t want to hurt one, but I will beat a lion to death with a shark if it tries to take a bite out of me.”

— Richard Kadrey

60. “I don’t believe in conspiracies. Guys will say anything to get laid.”

— Richard Kadrey

61. “If Donald Trump and the Wicked Witch of the West had a kid, it would be Jayne-Anne. She looks like a librarian with some money and good taste in clothes but underneath the Verace, she’s Godzilla with tits.”

— Richard Kadrey

62. “You were a prick and a crook, but no one deserves to go out the way you went. I hope it was over quick and that you tasted like ass all the way down. Amen.”

— Richard Kadrey

63. “So far, being dead is about as much fun as a barbed-wire G-string. Yes, there is such a thing. They invented it in Hell, which is where I am. I already said I was dead. Where else would I be? Try to keep up.”

— Richard Kadrey

64. “Death, like birth, is a secret of nature.” Only with birth you get a blanket and a bottle. You get a blanket with death too, but they call it a shroud and everyone else gets the bottle.”

— Richard Kadrey

65. “Calm down. Deep breaths. Go to your happy place. Oh, wait. I don’t have one.”

— Richard Kadrey

66. “I’m steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.”

— Richard Kadrey

67. “Maybe he was destined to die under the fading shadow of a plastic dinosaur surrounded by pickpockets, hookers, and panhandlers, but at least he’d never been to Mississippi.”

— Richard Kadrey

68. “Revenge is never what you think it’s going to be. There’s no pleasure and glory, and when it’s done your grief remains. Once a man does the things you’re talking about, he will never be the same, and he can never go back to who he was before. Worst of all, no matter how many enemies you kill, you are never satisfied. There is always one more who deserves it. When it becomes too easy to kill, it never ends.”

— Richard Kadrey

69. “What happened to your face?” she says idly. “Which time?” “The new one.” “I got shot.”

— Richard Kadrey

70. “None of the palaces in Hell come close to Lucifer’s in size or beauty. Lucifer lives at the top of a literal ivory tower, miles high. You can’t even see the top from the ground. The joke is that he built it that high so he can lean out the window and pound on Heaven’s floor with a broom handle when he wants them to turn down the choir.”

— Richard Kadrey

71. “If I’m going to ride this out and stay alive, then I’m king high ballbuster. I took on God and almost did the old man in. A few grumpy horns and hoofs types and a petting zoo full of rabid Pokemons? I’m Satan. I can deal that and play “Smoke on the Water” while getting a lap dance on a runaway train all at the same time.”

— Richard Kadrey

72. “Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow whiny bowling pins.”

— Richard Kadrey

73. “I came ready to fight Genghis Khan and I walk in on a shut-in playing the biggest Dungeons and Dragons game in history.”

— Richard Kadrey

74. “All losers are romantics. It’s what keeps us from blowing our brains out.”

— Richard Kadrey

75. “It’s part of why I came to Los Angeles. My real work. I kill the dead.”

— Richard Kadrey

76. “She looks like she just saw a ghost, a unicorn, and Hello Kitty having a three-way in a clown car and they didn’t invite her. I.”

— Richard Kadrey

77. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I’ll help you. We must always look after our friends, even when they are foolish. Especially when they are foolish.”

— Richard Kadrey

78. “I never liked Michael, and since he tried to kill me, I like him even less.”

— Richard Kadrey

79. “If his drunkenness had legs, it would be Alexander the Great and conquer the known world. Then it would puke for a week into a solid gold toilet it stole from Zeus’s guest room.”

— Richard Kadrey

80. “The clerk is looking at me. His expression hasn’t changed. What I want to do is punch a hole in the front of the desk, reach through, grab his balls, and make him sing The Mickey Mouse Club song. But these days, I’m working on the theory that killing everyone I don’t like might be counterproductive. I’m learning to use my indoor voice like a big boy, so I smile back at the clerk.”

— Richard Kadrey

81. “Damn, it feels great to hurt idiots.”

— Richard Kadrey

82. “When I was Downtown, I learned a lot about making threats. Make them big. Make them outrageous. You’re never going to kick someone’s ass. You’re going to pull out their tongue and pour liquid nitrogen down their throat, chip out their guts with an ice pick, slide in a pane of glass, and turn them into an aquarium.”

— Richard Kadrey

83. “Your image of yourself is one of a beast. A benevolent one, but a beast nonetheless. As much as this might pain you, it is also easy and familiar. It allows you to do away with deeper emotions.”

— Richard Kadrey

84. “And you’re going to do that all by yourself?” “If I pray real hard, I’m sure I can get the baby Jesus to watch over me.” “You just blew up a church,” says Candy. “Okay. The Devil then.” “That’s more like it.”

— Richard Kadrey

85. “He wore his fear on his skin for everyone to see.”

— Richard Kadrey

86. “Yes, there are vampires. Try to keep up.”

— Richard Kadrey

87. “It’s not something you think about, it just happens. You fall into the orbit of friends and familiar faces. You don’t even have to like each other. You just have to be there to remind each other that you survived and that this is real. I’m sure there’s a scientific name for it. The old fighters just called it Tea Time. Geryon.”

— Richard Kadrey

88. “Black is a good color anytime you’re flinging around blood.”

— Richard Kadrey

89. “But these days, I’m working on the theory that killing everyone I don’t like might be counterproductive.”

— Richard Kadrey

90. “Kasabian is still shrieking like a banshee, which is pretty good for a guy with no lungs.”

— Richard Kadrey

91. “Mostly, Sub Rosas are the people regular people aren’t supposed to know about. It’s not that we don’t like you; it’s that you have a habit of burning us at the stake when you notice us.”

— Richard Kadrey

92. “Hell doesn’t run on prayers or promises. Downtown magic is about reaching out and grabbing what you want, and that requires payment. An offering. Blood.”

— Richard Kadrey

93. “But she’s not going to call the cops or stab me in my sleep, and what more can you ask of a pretty girl?”

— Richard Kadrey

94. “When you live with a dead man’s head that won’t shut up and smokes all your cigarettes, the only way to deal with the awfulness is to make it so unbelievably awful that it becomes kind of weirdly beautiful. Like an exploding giraffe full of fireworks.”

— Richard Kadrey

95. “The downside to jackrabbit reflexes is that while they get you out of the way of obvious and imminent danger, when you’re going forty miles an hour on your front wheel, those reflexes will simply launch you into the air like a squirrel on a land mine.”

— Richard Kadrey

96. “My back feels like someone beat me with a pillowcase full of tuna-fish cans.”

— Richard Kadrey

97. “Like a man once said: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’” The.”

— Richard Kadrey

98. “Kids need their minds blown every now and then. It’ll keep them from thinking that managing a McDonald’s is the most they can hope for.”

— Richard Kadrey

99. “Of course, aside from fear, the God business runs on sentimentality. That’s the only explanation. Unless it’s a real estate scam.”

— Richard Kadrey

100. “Brooding is for chickens, as my first-grade teacher used to say. Or maybe it was Lucifer. Homily reciters all kind of run together for me.”

— Richard Kadrey