Ed McBain Quotes
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I’m getting so I miss my morning coffee and corpse.
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The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.
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The widow of Michael Reardon was a full‐breasted woman in her late thirties. She had dark hair and green eyes, and an Irish nose spattered with a clichéful of freckles. She had a face for merry‐go‐rounds and roller coaster rides, a face that could split in laughter and girlish glee when water was splashed on her at the seashore. She was a girl who could get drunk sniffing the vermouth cork before it was passed over a martini. She was a girl who went to church on Sundays, a girl who’d belonged to the Newman Club when she was younger, a girl who was a virgin two days after Mike.
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Formal theological teaching in Africa is deeply rooted in the Western missionary movement . However, in practice, the church wrestles with how to bring theology to bear on the realities it faces in the context.
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I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.
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I have a book coming out in September, for example, where the plot concerns counterfeiting, and I had to do a lot of research on that. Or on any legal matters, for example, I have to do a lot of research online.
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It always rains on Mondays anyway. Monday is the bitchingest day in the week and should be struck completely from the calendar.
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Why the hell would anyone ever choose police work as his profession, he wondered.
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Sarcasm is a weapon of the intellectual.
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It seemed to me... that the only valid people to deal with crime were cops, and I would like to make the lead character, rather than a single person, a squad of cops.
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In the US, we consider our foreign policy as something rooted in the protection of American ideals of democracy and human development. However, we often fail to see the damaging consequences, many of which may be unintended, on others - including Christians - living in other parts of the world.
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I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I'm now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones.
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The police department is a vast organization, and a detective is only an organization man.
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They were running out of suspects and into dead ends. They were running into airtight alibis and out of patience. They were running up one-way alleys and phone bills. They were running down a killer who did not yet exist. They were running around in circles.
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Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene.
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I never take ideas from the headlines. I feel that if a story is good enough, a real story that is, then it's already been covered by the media, and if it's not good enough, why would I want to bother with it?
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These women never cut the umbilical cord. We get raised by one woman, and then when we're ripe, we get turned over to another woman.
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A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week.
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I would certainly never suggest that any lesbian should be ashamed of her sexual preference.
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I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
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Changing writing styles is like an actor taking on a different part.
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In conversations and visits with friends from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe I am often struck by the gaps in our Western theological approaches. The most common texts used in evangelical schools have been written in the US, UK, and Australia. However, they miss some fundamental contextual issues.
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I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don't agree with me as to their worth.
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Georgie’s grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be called an Italian-American. In Georgie’s eyes, this was the only time the hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian-Americans, it made them simply Americans.