Kim Newman > Quotes

“Moriarty smiled his adder’s smile.

And I relaxed. I knew. My destiny and his wound together. It was a sensation I’d never got before upon meeting a man. When I’d had it from women, the upshot ranged from disappointment to attempted murder. Understand me, Professor James Moriarty was a hateful man, the most hateful, hateable, creature I have ever known, not excluding Sir Augustus and Kali’s Kitten and the Abominable Bloody Snow-Bastard and the Reverend Henry James Prince. He was something man-shaped that had crawled out from under a rock and moved into the manor house. But, at that moment, I was his, and I remain his forever. If I am remembered, it will be because I knew him. From that day on, he was my father, my commanding officer, my heathen idol, my fortune and terror and rapture.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“Dullards would have you believe that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth... but to a mathematical mind, the impossible is simply a theorem yet to be solved. We must not eliminate the impossible, we must conquer it, suborn it to our purpose.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.'

In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“We need to stop the little girl," said Richard "pass me that shotgun.”
― Kim Newman, The Man from the Diogenes Club

“He left the room, and closeted himself in the dark, buzzing space where he raised his wasps and plotted the courses of heavenly bodies.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“How did your parents come to be "lost at sea", Moriarty?'

The professor paused, and said, 'Mysteriously, Moran.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“Moriarty rarely smiled,and then usually to terrify some poor victim. The first time I heard him laugh, I thought he had been struck by a deadly poison and the stutter escaping through his locked jaws was a death rattle.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“No crime too small’ was never exactly Moriarty’s slogan, but the criminal genius would apply himself to minor offences if an unusual challenge was presented.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“Somehow, the notion that Professor Moriarty had parents - might have been a child - never sat right. A viper is a snake straight from the egg. I couldn't help but picture little Jamie as a balding midget in a sailor suit, spying Cook and the baker's boy rolling in the flour on the kitchen table through his toy telescope, and blackmailing them for extra buns.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“Good things come to an end, bad things have to be stopped.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“Quite a few vampires, especially the elders, regarded those who creep through graveyard shadows in batwing capes and fingerless black gloves as an Edinburgh gentleman might look upon a Yankee with a single Scots grandparent who swathes himself in kilts and tartan sashes, prefaces every remark with quotes from Burns or Scott and affects a fondness for bagpipes and haggis.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“Writing. It's a trivial pursuit, hardly worth the effort, inconsequential on any cosmic level. It's just blood and sweat and guts and bone hauled out of our bodies and fed through a typewriter to slosh all over the platen.”
― Kim Newman, Johnny Alucard

“Love is always a species of insanity. If”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“He stroked Tibbles, who was starting to leak and make nasty little noises.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“Impaler,’ she declared, ‘I have no equal.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“This is the moral, Oh My Best Beloved: never kill anyone for a 'Cause'.
For why not, Uncle Basher?
Because causes don't pay, Little Friend of all the World. Adherents expect you to kill just for the righteousness of it. They don't want to pay you! They don't understand why you want paying!”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“Only an idiot guesses or reasons or deduces,’ the Professor said, patiently.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“Quería destruir a un monstruo, no convertirme yo en uno”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“Relevance, Wilde once explained, was a careless habit that should not be over-indulged.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“It was as if there were but one woman in the world, laughing at him from behind a dozen masks.”
― Kim Newman, The Bloody Red Baron

“Mad' sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in 'em that you put there. 'Mad' is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner of lunacy as you're turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest 'scrape' was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“W ere you aware,’ began Lord Ruthven, ‘that there are people in these isles whose sole objection to the marriage of our dear Queen – Victoria Regina, Empress of India, et cetera – to Vlad Dracula – known as Tepes, quondam Prince of Wallachia – is that the happy bridegroom happened once to be, in a fashion I shan’t pretend to understand, a Roman Catholic?”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“Power is based, at bottom, on the ability to kill; thus the means of killing have to be available, even if only to a select few.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“Curious, Amy asked Absalom how anarchists celebrated the holidays. The girl explained her family exchanged radical pamphlets and gelignite recipes while dining on a roast swan her father had specifically poached from a royal estate. Instead of carols around a tree, they sang revolutionary songs in front of a fire into which they threw straw dollies made in the image of kings, presidents, colossi of finance and secret police chiefs. Absalom and her sisters nibbled biscuits decorated with red sugar stars and slogans of the struggle.”
― Kim Newman, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

“-La plata y la estaca me romperán el corazón, mas los hombres jamás me herirán.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula

“You’re a woman,’ he said. ‘You can’t resist me.’
‘I’m gender non-binary, you shit.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju

“Alfred Dreyfus had been a scapegoat because he was at once a Jew and a vampire.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

“Sporty, terrifying, babies and posh, yes. What are we?’ ‘Desdemona? Red-headed stepchildren. Who don’t fit anywhere else.”
― Kim Newman, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

“It was a wonder a period of history so full of people having their heads chopped off could be made to seem so blindingly dull.”
― Kim Newman, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

“Places, she told herself, were not evil: they were what people made of them.”
― Kim Newman, Anno Dracula