Top 40 Val McDermid Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not magic that takes us to another world – it’s storytelling.”

— Val McDermid

2. “A society gets the criminals it deserves.”

— Val McDermid

3. “To move forward, you have to accept the truth of a situation. Not persist in myth-making.”

— Val McDermid

4. “There’s a thing called narcissistic personality disorder. People who have an inflated sense of their own importance, a lack of empathy for others. They’re vain, they crave the power over others they think they deserve. They can be arrogant and callous. They think they’re better than everybody else and they don’t care who they trample on in their desire to get what they want.’ ‘A bit like Donald Trump, then?”

— Val McDermid

5. “No woman is a heroine to her dentist.”

— Val McDermid

6. “You can’t prove a negative. I can’t prove there are no such thing as vampires any more than you can prove you’re not a lesbian.”

— Val McDermid

7. “Nothing warms the cockles of the heart more than the smug self-satisfaction of being right.”

— Val McDermid

8. “It was a source of constant disappointment to Catherine Morland that her life did not more closely resemble her books. Or rather, that the books in which she found its likeness were so unexciting.”

— Val McDermid

9. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’.”

— Val McDermid

10. “It’s your fault because you got me into Morag Fraser. I’d never even heard of the Hebridean Harpies series till you dragged me along to her event. And now I am totally hooked. I was reading Vampires on Vatersay till one in the morning. I just had to finish it. And then I started Banshees of Berneray at breakfast and I could hardly drag myself away from it to come and meet you.”

— Val McDermid

11. “That was the trouble with moving houses; no matter how carefully you packed the books, they never ended up on the new shelves in quite the right place.”

— Val McDermid

12. “No two bodies will decompose in the same way, and at the same rate. You can have two bodies that are literally six feet apart and they will decompose in entirely different manners. It could be the amount of fat on the body. It could be the drugs they were taking, or the medication. It could be the type of clothing they’re wearing. It could be that one has a particular odour that is more attractive to flies than the other. Absolutely anything.”

— Val McDermid

13. “Time for the likeliest story since Mary told Joseph it was God’s.”

— Val McDermid

14. “We make high demands on the people we expect to deliver justice, and we don’t always appreciate how much it eats away at them.”

— Val McDermid

15. “Not even a hand-stitched suit could hide a body gone ruinously to seed. I was tempted to offer some fashion advice, but I didn’t think he’d welcome the news that this year, bellies are being worn inside the trousers.”

— Val McDermid

16. “It’s only hunting you that keeps me from being you.”

— Val McDermid

17. “He frowned as he struggled to remember. It was like watching an elephant crochet.”

— Val McDermid

18. “We see some of the worst things that mankind can do to each other and I still get shocked by some of the things that occur. Most people can go home and talk to their families about what they’ve done at work. We can’t. But even if I could, I don’t want my family to know some of the things that I’ve seen.”

— Val McDermid

19. “The Glasgow accent was so strong you could have built a bridge with it and known it would outlast the civilization that spawned it.”

— Val McDermid

20. “With the passage of time, people’s memories always edited the past. A lot of details slipped from their grasp, while others that had seemed trivial at the time took on greater weight.”

— Val McDermid

21. “Without work, without direction, his thoughts were like a hamster on a wheel, circling and dancing with no destination and no possibility of arrival. With.”

— Val McDermid

22. “Attractive smile, Carol added to her list of particulars as she shook the hand.”

— Val McDermid

23. “Around five-eight, slim, good shoulders, narrow hips, legs and trunk in proportion, short dark hair, side parting, dark eyes, probably blue, shadows under the eyes, fair skin, average nose, wide mouth, lower lip fuller than upper.”

— Val McDermid

24. “It was a lot easier to be optimistic about equality when you didn’t have to confront the Neanderthals on a daily basis. When you could imagine that people were actually changing their minds because they’d stopped groping secretaries at the photocopier.”

— Val McDermid

25. “Discovering dedicated mystery booksellers was a bit like going to heaven without having to die first.”

— Val McDermid

26. “It wasn’t enough but it was a start. It might keep him going...”

— Val McDermid

27. “Father, everybody has mugs these days. It’s not a sign of debauchery and disrepute to drink tea from a mug.”

— Val McDermid

28. “Steve Mosby has become one of a handful of writers who make me excited about crime fiction.”

— Val McDermid

29. “Patsy McDonald had the artificial brightness and dead eyes that go hand in hand with prescription antidepressants. They.”

— Val McDermid

30. “You know, I’ve often wondered. It’s pretty clear what they were up to in Sodom, but what do you suppose the sin of Gomorrah was?′ Carol asked.”

— Val McDermid

31. “You are Tadeusz Radecki? I am in the right place?′ ‘I know who I am. What I want to know is who you are.”

— Val McDermid

32. “It had seemed a good idea at the time to order the furniture for her new home online from a chain retailer.”

— Val McDermid

33. “I know that. I do watch Spooks.′ Carol was surprised. ‘You do? I don’t.’ ‘You should. They do.”

— Val McDermid

34. “The nurse looked surprised. ‘You’re a bit high on the totem pole to be taking statements.’ Carol debated momentarily how to describe her relationship with Tony. ‘Colleague’ was insufficient, ‘landlord’ somehow misleading and ‘friend’ both more and less than the truth. She shrugged. ‘He feeds my cat.”

— Val McDermid

35. “When all else fails, go for the ego.”

— Val McDermid

36. “He looked so vulnerable and fallible, his shoulders slumped, his head down, that Carol’s impulses overrode the decision she’d taken only minutes before to play it cool. She stepped forward and pulled Tony into a tight hug. ‘If anyone can do it, you can,’ she whispered against his chin like a cat marking its territory.”

— Val McDermid

37. “They think of policemen as they do of Labradors – noble, loyal, good with children, man’s protector and friend. In.”

— Val McDermid

38. “The discipline is based on one grisly fact: a corpse makes a good lunch.”

— Val McDermid

39. “No. It’s no the same. The interviewers want you to say what they want to hear. I want to hear what you have to say.”

— Val McDermid

40. “She watched his pale, square hands on the map, the short almost stubby fingers, with their neatly trimmed nails and a sparse scattering of fine black hairs on the bottom section of each finger. Appalled, she felt a stirring of desire. You’re pathetic as an adolescent, she savagely chided herself. Like a teenager who fancies the first teacher who says anything nice about your work. Grow up, Jordan!”

— Val McDermid

41. “Nothing consoles you for the loss of someone you love. You absorb it into you. You move forward but you move in a different way.’ She.”

— Val McDermid

42. “We take the staples of modern life so much for granted until we’re deprived of them. People do live quite well without what we consider to be basics, but they manage because they’ve never been de-skilled by their presence. To lose them when you’ve lived all your life with power at the touch of a switch and water at the turn of a tap is shocking, then unsettling, then grindingly depressing.”

— Val McDermid

43. “They’d all known each other long enough to forgive each other’s faults, to accept each other’s politics and to say what would be unsayable in any other company.”

— Val McDermid

44. “To come up against someone who appeared not to give a damn about exerting petty power almost restored his faith in the public.”

— Val McDermid

45. “We never want to talk about the difficult things. But if we don’t they poison the good things in our lives.”

— Val McDermid

46. “Grief is individual. Some like it public, some like it private. For some, it’s complicated because their relationship with the dead was complicated.”

— Val McDermid

47. “What it had done, however, was to give him a feeling of power and control that had taken him back to how he used to feel every day.”

— Val McDermid