Top 50 Tom Holt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.”

— Tom Holt

2. “Telling lies is a bit like tiling bathrooms – if you don’t know how to do it properly, it’s best not to try.”

— Tom Holt

3. “Only please, do be careful to bear in mind that Mordak’s a goblin. Enlightened, yes, but a goblin. He likes his employees loyal or lightly steamed on a bed of bruised rocket.”

— Tom Holt

4. “A brief note on the legend of Pandora’s Box: Ever wondered why bundled in with all the torrents, and suffering of man kind the Gods put hope down there at the bottom, answer because in certain circumstances hope can be the worst torment of them all.”

— Tom Holt

5. “Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.”

— Tom Holt

6. “Luck isn’t a wheelbarrow, Maurice; it works better if you don’t push it. Stay.”

— Tom Holt

7. “Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.”

— Tom Holt

8. “Not only had he lost the only girl he’d ever loved, he’d lost her in duplicate, like some heartbroken but highly efficient civil servant.”

— Tom Holt

9. “Mostly I sit at home in the evenings watching the box and hoping that one day I’ll evolve into plankton.”

— Tom Holt

10. “I know what you’re doing,” the wolf said. “This is advanced interrogation techniques, right? First you destroy my self-esteem and sense of individuality, then you force me to tell you where the pack hides out, so your woodcutter pals can come and slaughter us. Well, you’re wasting your breath. I won’t talk. I won’t talk. Got that?”

— Tom Holt

11. “American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot, sunny day. It’s never really caught on in the UK, probably because the last time we had a hot, sunny day was back in 1957.”

— Tom Holt

12. “Lawyers are predators in grey worsted.”

— Tom Holt

13. “Everything is out there if you know how to find it, and have the patience. I don’t and haven’t, but that’s my problem.”

— Tom Holt

14. “There’s all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to – learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad – but I just didn’t have the time.”

— Tom Holt

15. “The worst punishment there is for wanting the wrong thing is getting it.”

— Tom Holt

16. “After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one’s head against the universe until something gives?”

— Tom Holt

17. “In spite of really intense competition for the job, I’m still my own worst enemy.”

— Tom Holt

18. “In his dream, George Stetchkin was in the dock at the Central Criminal Court, accused of the murder of nine million innocent brain cells. The usher was showing the jury the alleged murder weapon, an empty Bison Brand wodka bottle. Then the judge glared at him over the rims of his spectacles and sentenced him to the worst hangover of his life.”

— Tom Holt

19. “I don’t read the Sunday papers; or the dailies, either.”

— Tom Holt

20. “Call it a hunch; and hunches don’t just materialise, you pay for them with hard-earned experience. No such thing as a free hunch.”

— Tom Holt

21. “Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don’t usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there’s nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.”

— Tom Holt

22. “There’s an old goblin saying; there is nothing to fear but fear itself and scary things.”

— Tom Holt

23. “Having finally come to the end of this narrative, Malcolm was left with two abiding impressions: first, that Fafner the dragon, instead of keeping his money under the mattress like everyone else, had kept his mattress under the money; second, that humanity generally gets the Gods it deserves.”

— Tom Holt

24. “People are sometimes easily overlooked. The holes they leave behind when they aren’t there any more are far harder to miss.”

— Tom Holt

25. “All computers expect to be yelled at. There’s not a single computer in the whole world that hasn’t been sworn at. Even the discreet little VDU with the crossed keys monogram on the keyboard that sits on the Pope’s desk in his office in the Vatican has in its time heard language that’d make a Marine blush.”

— Tom Holt

26. “There’s nothing bad about reincarnation per se, it’s basically a very good system, cost-effective and ecologically friendly.”

— Tom Holt

27. “The best definition of an immortal is someone who hasn’t died yet.”

— Tom Holt

28. “But the world continued to thrive and prosper, with only the epidemic of love and romance spoiling an otherwise perfect situation.”

— Tom Holt

29. “As usual when asked to think of something, Malcolm’s mind went completely blank.”

— Tom Holt

30. “There are few moments of clarity more profound than those that follow the emptying of an overcharged bladder. The world slows down, the focus sharpens, the brain comes back on line. Huge nebulous difficulties prove on close calm examination to be merely cloud giants.”

— Tom Holt

31. “New technology is useful, but it’s inefficient and ugly; it knows it’ll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else.”

— Tom Holt

32. “A romantic, I think the word is. Latin for idiot.”

— Tom Holt

33. “Necessity is the mother of invention, which probably explains why invention’s father left home on the pretext of buying a newspaper and hasn’t been heard of since.”

— Tom Holt

34. “Books, the estate agent had told him, provide excellent insulation, and since the heating bills would be very considerable in any event, he might as well leave them there even if he had no intention of ever reading them.”

— Tom Holt

35. “You don’t go around saying “Am I happy?” all the time, unless you’re human, of course.”

— Tom Holt

36. “American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot.”

— Tom Holt

37. “The world is full of interiors that bleach the spirit. Hospitals, police stations, job centres, local government offices and prisons all have their own subtle type of vampire colour scheme and black-hole furnishing, capable by accident or design of wiping away a person’s self-esteem and will to resist, like boiled-over soup off a ceramic hob.”

— Tom Holt

38. “Thanks anyway,′ Vanderdecker repeated, and wandered off to have a stare at the sea. It was his equivalent to beating his head repeatedly against a wall.”

— Tom Holt

39. “That’s the problem with running away, said the little voice. No matter where you go, you have to take yourself with you; and if yourself is constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone and not worrying if the rest of the world is weirder than ferret ragout, where the hell is the point?”

— Tom Holt

40. “I try and do 2,500 words a day, every day of the year.”

— Tom Holt

41. “The next morning, Malcolm thought long and hard before waking up, for he had come to recognise over the past quarter of a century that rather less can go wrong if you are asleep.”

— Tom Holt

42. “Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I’ve managed to grow out of.”

— Tom Holt

43. “The fact that he hated and feared his new environment was largely beside the point, for he had been taught long ago that what he thought and felt about any given subject was without question the least important thing in the world.”

— Tom Holt

44. “It was irritating to have one’s physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger.”

— Tom Holt

45. “There comes a time when a man must stand up and do what he knows is Wrong.”

— Tom Holt

46. “At any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance.”

— Tom Holt

47. “Threats... are the last resort of the inadequate negotiator.”

— Tom Holt

48. “If you’re mortal, all they can do to you is kill you.”

— Tom Holt

49. “Suddenly, she was not pretty at all; she looked like a thousand-year-old teenager who wanted something she knew she couldn’t have.”

— Tom Holt

50. “After all, why be right when you can be happy.”

— Tom Holt