James Grady > Quotes

“Do you thinking not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"--Robert Redford from the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“You mean how do I know you are who you say you are?” Merle shrugged. “How do you know anybody is who they say they are?” She shook her head. “We lie to ourselves about who we see, we lie to ourselves about who we are. Then we buy our own lies and try to spend them as our lives.”
― James Grady, Last Days of the Condor: A Novel

“I needed a day job that required me mostly to use my mind and hands, because my heart and soul belonged to my dreams.”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“Nothing left but true: “You’re gravity I can’t escape.” His sore heart labored beats in the darkness. “What am I supposed to do with that?” she said. “What you can,” he said. “What you want.”
― James Grady, Last Days of the Condor: A Novel

“If you’re going to frame a crazy, build a crazy frame.”
― James Grady, Last Days of the Condor: A Novel

“On top of all that, here on his bed sat a funny-looking girl wearing a T shirt and a smile.”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“He forced his mind to picture a brick wall, to feel a brick wall, smell a brick wall, become a brick wall. He lost all sense of time, but the bricks stood out. He heard the voices questioning him, but he turned their sounds to bricks for his wall.”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a team generally regarded as seeking justice, can be compared to the adventures of Rex Stout's two most famous characters, Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin.”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“The function of the Society and of Department 17 is to keep track of all espionage and related acts recorded in literature. In other words, the Department reads spy thrillers and murder mysteries”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“you were thinking, and that’s very good. It’s the one thing we’ve never been able to train our people to do, and it’s one thing these massive organizations tend to discourage.”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“Ask them, then. ...Ask them when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them, when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know something? They won't want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it.”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“The Central Intelligence Agency, America’s best-known spy shop. In that fearful post-Joe McCarthy era, when assassinated JFK had publicly loved James Bond and secretly been entangled in covert intrigues like assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro outsourced to the Mafia by our spies, the CIA was a myth-shrouded invisible army. In those pre-Internet days before electronic books, Web sites with varied credibility, and search”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“If not me, who?” “Who? You’re Condor, not an owl.”
― James Grady, Condor: The Short Takes

“basement to the coalbin exit”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor

“I’m not a spy. I just read books.”
― James Grady, Six Days of the Condor