Top 84 Philip Kerr Quotes
#1. Me and Schopenhauer. Sometimes being German seems to come with some serious disadvantages.
Philip Kerr
#2. James Bond was an early favourite, although I didn't understand much of it. I read the Bible a lot, too. You might say that this was my favourite, since I seemed to read it so often.
Philip Kerr
#3. I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes.
Philip Kerr
#4. A man might think he can stare into the abyss without falling in but sometimes the abyss stares back. Sometimes the abyss exerts a strange effect on your sense of balance.
Philip Kerr
#5. All nationalism is based on racism and hate. I'm Scottish; I was born in Scotland, as my parents, as my grandparents.
Philip Kerr
#6. I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.
Philip Kerr
#7. I was a member of Corstorphine Library in Edinburgh, and every Friday night, my parents took me there to borrow books. I also used to spend nearly all my pocket money on books.
Philip Kerr
#8. I used to play quite a good lead guitar, R&B style. Clapton and BB King are heroes.
Philip Kerr
#9. I didn't know you were interested in politics,' I said. 'I'm not,' he said. 'But isn't that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn't give a shit who was running the country?
Philip Kerr
#10. Sport crosses party lines and ethnic lines. It occupies a greater realm, and it's all the more disappointing when sports figures turn out to be like everyone else.
Philip Kerr
#11. There is always a temptation to take things for granted, to get lazy, and to presume that the reader knows more than they do.
Philip Kerr
#12. Horror does not need the dark, and sometimes a truly evil deed shuns the shadows.
Philip Kerr
#13. When you're working for people who are mostly thieves and murderers, a little of it comes off on your hands now and then.
Philip Kerr
#14. She walked toward me, her high heels perforating the polished wooden air of the Richmond's quiet basement like the slow beat of a tall clock.
Philip Kerr
#15. Dalia picked up her negligee. She didn't need my help, it wasn't very heavy.
Philip Kerr
#16. Looking round the room I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught.
Philip Kerr
#17. At least that was what she had told me. You never know with women. What they tell you and what they don't tell you is a very long bridge across a very wide river with all kinds of fish.
Philip Kerr
#18. Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.
Philip Kerr
#19. All successful marriages are based on some necessary hypocrisies. It's only the unsuccessful ones where people always tell the truth to each other. The
Philip Kerr
#20. I really wanted to write the way Kubrick makes films - 'Strangelove,' '2001', 'Clockwork Orange', 'Barry Lyndon' - they're all so different.
Philip Kerr
#21. Socrates learned to his cost, the true nature of democracy is to encourage corruption and excess in all its forms. But the
Philip Kerr
#22. truth is rarely the truth and the things you thought weren't true often turn out not to be false.
Philip Kerr
#23. Compared with the person who had decorated and furnished the place, the Archduke Ferdinand had been blessed with the taste of a troupe of Turkish circus dwarves.
Philip Kerr
#24. I always worry I've probably written one too many Bernie Gunther books and that I should probably give him his gold watch.
Philip Kerr
#25. If there's one thing history has taught me to believe it is that it's dangerous to believe in anything very much.
Philip Kerr
#26. The real question here is what happens to you, Gunther. In many ways you're a useful fellow to have around. Like a bent coat hanger in a toolbox, you're not something that was ever designed for a specific job, but you do manage to come in useful sometimes.
Philip Kerr
#27. History asks us to imagine ourselves in a period, but it's a very different situation when you're in that period and faced with those situations.
Philip Kerr
#28. Religion was quite a thing in our house - we were Baptists. Some Sundays I went to church three times. If there was a talk on missionary work in the afternoon, I could be there all bloody day. But religion took its first big knock after Dad died.
Philip Kerr
#29. that's the thing about urgent paperwork: the longer you leave it the less urgent it becomes.
Philip Kerr
#30. Publishers just want you to write the same book over and over again. But why would I want to do that? It would be like putting on a threadbare dressing-gown day after day.
Philip Kerr
#31. Looking at him I felt as if I had just met a powerful gorilla while at the same time being in possession of the world's last banana.
Philip Kerr
#32. The mark of a writer is to make a story as likely as possible, and I've done my best to deliver authentic atmosphere.
Philip Kerr
#33. Hmm. That's what I suspected, you mad bastard.
Philip Kerr
#34. No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off, I thought; there's nothing else to do in a place like this but cut your ear off.
Philip Kerr
#35. Sometimes I think God is just the devil pretending to be nice.
Philip Kerr
#36. There's something weird about the Scots. We are a troubled, slightly tortured race - the sense of the respectable outward character and, inside, the turmoil of something darker.
Philip Kerr
#37. She was shot dead, in cold blood, he said bitterly. I could see we were in for a long night. I got out my cigarettes.
Philip Kerr
#38. I was never one for looking at beautiful scenery, and certainly not since 1933; it distracts from the more important and admittedly metropolitan business of keeping an eye out for the Gestapo, which, with my politics, is an ever-present dilemma.
Philip Kerr
#39. I shrugged. "Staying in a hotel is a bit like life. At some stage you have to check out." "Oh,
Philip Kerr
#40. It is always the women who rebuild the civilizations that the men have done their best to destroy
Philip Kerr
#41. I think the context of an hour-long drama gives breathing space that you don't get in a film.
Philip Kerr
#43. A man's bookseller should keep his confidence, like his physician. What can become of a world where every man knows what another man reads? Why, sir, books would become like quacks' potions, with every mountebank in the newspapers claiming one volume's superiority over another.
Philip Kerr
#44. He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, ...
Philip Kerr
#45. Believe me, I know a lot about harm's way. It turns sharp left off the road to Shitsville when you're least expecting it.
Philip Kerr
#46. The living always get over the dead. That's what the dead never realize. If ever the dead did come back, they'd only have been sore that somehow you managed to get over their dying at all.
Philip Kerr
#47. The hardest thing is to write about people. First and foremost, you have to encounter their humanity. That is the only way you can make them live as characters on the page.
Philip Kerr
#48. As a writer, you rely on whatever makes you up as a person, whether those things are twisted and nasty or otherwise.
Philip Kerr
#49. Sometimes a stupid man is only a couple of good guesses away from looking clever.
Philip Kerr
#50. to per cent I'll see if I can find him for you.' I
Philip Kerr
#51. I made an appointment to see him and then ordered another beer. While I was drinking it I did some doodling on a piece of paper, the algebraic kind that you hope will help you think more clearly. When I finished doing that, I was more confused than ever. Algebra was never my strong subject.
Philip Kerr
#52. Being British, we tend to think of ourselves as America's best friend. And as your best friend, that gives us a little bit of license to point out things that could have been handled better.
Philip Kerr
#53. After a while, you get tired of being the official Scot and defending everything Scottish.
Philip Kerr
#54. That smelled strongly of misery, which, as anyone will tell you, is a subtle mixture of hope, despair, rancid cooking fat, and men's piss.
Philip Kerr
#55. I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don't like to do too much that's improbable.
Philip Kerr
#56. Sport seems to be much more important to people than politics.
Philip Kerr
#57. When I feel I'm repeating myself, I'll probably pack it in.
Philip Kerr
#58. There's a great tradition among the English of writing about Berlin. It's kind of a state of mind, almost. That even translates in terms of music. A lot of people go to Berlin with the idea that it's a state of mind.
Philip Kerr
#59. A first class professional nutcracker who might have done a job about a week ago; stolen some bells.
Philip Kerr
#60. It's not easy being the world's policeman. No one thanks you for it.
Philip Kerr
#61. I don't think any of us know how we would react until we were put in a situation where we have to do something bad or do something good. I think I'd like to believe I'd act like a decent human being, but I'm realistic to know I don't know.
Philip Kerr
#62. Farraj looked at me with the clinical distaste of a chiropodist regarding a septic toenail.
Philip Kerr
#63. If I weren't a writer, I think I might have thrown myself more enthusiastically into advertising. But, it's difficult to imagine being a diligent copywriter. It would be quite exasperating for me.
Philip Kerr
#64. One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany's favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.
Philip Kerr
#65. This is the country for cruel experiments - it's where idealists are sent to die, my friend. Killing people who believe in things is our national sport." With
Philip Kerr
#66. In my experience, Corporal, the best police work looks like nothing at all and is always soon forgotten." I
Philip Kerr
#67. On the whole it's not wise to remind the devil that he's the devil, especially when we were getting on so well.
Philip Kerr
#68. Winter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope
Philip Kerr
#69. I don't much like opera, either. Especially Wagner. There's something about Wagner that's just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking-top when a woman's singing a song.
Philip Kerr
#70. thought that was the whole idea of the German Reformation. To abolish priestly intercession.
Philip Kerr
#71. The most interesting legal philosophy is German, so naturally I went to Germany, particularly to Berlin, quite a bit.
Philip Kerr
#72. I think John le Carre is, at 77, the greatest living writer alive. He is a master craftsman.
Philip Kerr
#73. I write by hand and then transfer the text onto the computer. I like the process of actually having a pen in my hand. Things flow more easily for me that way.
Philip Kerr
#74. The fascination for me writing about crime in Berlin was the idea that there was this much bigger crime taking place in the background, a fantastically epochal moment in history which is just going on. That just sort of makes the whole thing have a greater resonance.
Philip Kerr
#75. I don't really like heroes who always behave heroically. That's not interesting to me.
Philip Kerr
#76. She ordered a coffee, and I ordered something I had no interest in drinking, so long as she was around.
Philip Kerr
#77. Scotland is the only case in the world where the poor part of a territory wants to separate from the rich part. If independence came, one option is to keep the pound as its currency, so that all economic decisions will continue to be taken by the Bank of England.
Philip Kerr
#78. My parents had never been to Germany. But I knew what I didn't want to write about, and I didn't want to write about Edinburgh. A lot of writers find Edinburgh fascinating, but I never did. As a matter of fact, I couldn't wait to get away from it.
Philip Kerr
#79. When you get a cat to catch the mice in your kitchen, you can't expect it to ignore the rats in the cellar.
Philip Kerr
#80. The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft. Her hair was every bit as natural as a parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she'd evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she's applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth.
Philip Kerr
#81. The man who succeeds is the man who is able to reduce problems to their simplest terms and who has the courage of his convictions - despite the objections of intellectuals. The courage to speak, perhaps, even when he believes that what he is suggesting sounds like madness.
Philip Kerr
#82. I will say that anyone who supports Scottish independence should go to Athens. Because nothing works. It is a disaster. It is a ruined, dirty place where people do not have money or future prospects. The day one after independence, Scotland would be worse.
Philip Kerr
#83. All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn't a tragedy, but you need a hell of a sense of humour to handle it.
Philip Kerr
#84. Well, who knew? When they were elected. That they were crooks, I mean." "Pretty much everyone who didn't vote for them, Friedrich. And I suspect quite a few of the stupid fools who did. Which only makes it worse.
Philip Kerr
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