Ken Bruen Quotes

#1. He looked old, like a stranger. He was someone else, someone whom he could easily hate. (Tom Pitts, Piggyback)

Ken Bruen

#2. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

Ken Bruen

#3. Sometimes there's just no justice. The bad guys do live, if not happily ever after, then certainly conspicuously.

Ken Bruen

#4. Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.

Ken Bruen

#5. She obviously had disappointing news in her teens and wasn't yet recovered.

Ken Bruen

#6. In London, I tended to hang with the fallen.

Ken Bruen

#7. Hemingway had a handy dictum. You want to know if something is morally right? Listen to your stomach. If it sits like broken glass, then it's morally wrong.

Ken Bruen

#8. You ever read Anton LaVey?

Ken Bruen

#9. Tony Black is the Tom Waits of Crime Fiction, yes, that good.

Ken Bruen

#10. There'll be times when the only refuge is books. Then you'll read as if you meant it, as if your life depended on it.

Ken Bruen

#11. The only book in our home was the Bible. My parents forbade books. They thought I needed help because I wanted to be a writer!

Ken Bruen

#12. Friday night, I resolved to have a quiet time. Two pints and a chips carry-home. Alas, the pints got away from me and I hit the top shelf.

Ken Bruen

#13. I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange." (Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks)

Ken Bruen

#14. The Local Paper here asked that me books be banned ... THE HIGHEST PRAISE for an Irish writer.

Ken Bruen

#15. The national sport in Ireland, apart from talking, is hurling.

Ken Bruen

#16. Jack Taylor was a private investigator in Galway, which seemed like madness. I used lots of Galway-isms, which seemed like madness, too.

Ken Bruen

#17. My own life has had so many twists that I keep thinking I'll have one blessing that is not in disguise.

Ken Bruen

#18. I get through some print.

Ken Bruen

#19. Your life is in some bizarre state when priests are throwing abuse at you on the street.

Ken Bruen

#20. Max couldn't believe he'd fallen for her. If he'd just had a thing for flat-chested women none of this would have happened.

Ken Bruen

#21. He was in his mid-thirties, with a posture that suggested a hundred.

Ken Bruen

#22. I was a failed actor, but for 25 years, I got to go on stage anyway, and I loved it. I've still got the day job, and the travel bug.

Ken Bruen

#23. I didn't know what to say. Said 'I don't know what to say.

Ken Bruen

#24. Let it Ride channels Elmore Leonard at the height of his powers, with dialogue Quentin Tarantino would kill for.

Ken Bruen

#25. Even Def Leppard couldn't get him out of his funk. When the Def couldn't crank you, it was way past time to shoot someone.

Ken Bruen

#26. Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books

C.J. Box

#27. I always had this notion of a noir novel in Galway. The city is exploding, emigration has reversed, and we are fast becoming a cosmopolitan city.

Ken Bruen

#28. Whenever dark things happen in my life, there is always some dark humour.

Ken Bruen

#29. -it's life... In all its granite hardness.

Ken Bruen

#30. I decided to write books, just to prove to myself that I was still alive, if nothing else.

Ken Bruen

#31. Roberts knocked, heard: 'Enter.' Thought: 'Wanker.

Ken Bruen

#32. Because I've been so bad at looking after myself, how would I ever look after a kid? But the old cliche applied: they handed her to me, and my world turned upside down - and I realised I was now going to be vulnerable in more ways than I expected.

Ken Bruen

#33. We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.

Ken Bruen

#34. I had me one sharp knife, a throwback to my glory days of the swans, and it's sharp as a nun on her second sherry.

Ken Bruen

#35. You'd test the patience of a saint.

Ken Bruen

#36. Expect nothing, and by Christ, you're entitled to even less.

Ken Bruen

#37. I committed a cardinal sin as a kid. I never spoke, and my mother thought there was something seriously wrong with me. A silent child is regarded as a problem in Ireland, and I just read all the time.

Ken Bruen

#38. A mini-cab later and he arrived in Stockwell, where the pit bulls travelled in twos. Ludlow Road is near the tube station, a short mugging away.

Ken Bruen

#39. And so evil flourishes and spreads because decent people don't want to make a fuss.

Ken Bruen

#40. He missed two people: a) the girl she was; b) the person she'd made him feel he might have been. A deep sigh escaped him.

Ken Bruen

#41. I'd kill to be a poet.

Ken Bruen

#42. By the holy, Jack Taylor. I was beginning to think you were a rumor running around as a fact.

Ken Bruen

#43. The writing is a joy, so seamless you nearly miss the sheer artistry of the style and the terrific, wry humour.

Ken Bruen

#44. The tourist board have put a bounty on me head, but they like the biz from tourists.

Ken Bruen

#45. The whiskey kicked like a mugger.

Ken Bruen

#46. My father believed a real man didn't read, and my parents hoped I'd get some sense and find a job in insurance.

Ken Bruen

#47. After five awful movies, I admitted failure and said I was not cut out to be an actor. But how many people get a chance to live their dream?

Ken Bruen

#48. Books. I needed to ground myself and nothing, not even the Jay, quite does it like books. I don't always have the focus to read them but I sure do need them around

Ken Bruen

#49. Laundromats ... like a waiting room for people who didn't go anywhere

Ken Bruen

#50. An alkie in full defiant

Ken Bruen

#51. It's said the difference between one friend and none is infinity.

Ken Bruen