I got into reading a lot of noir and a lot of thrillers as well, and I really admired the plotting about those and the way that they can surprise you. And obviously to surprise...

The man is a monster. The worst I have ever seen, in fact, since I last looked in the mirror. The truth? I am rotting too. I am buried alive, and already rotting. If I...

On the battlefield there are no rules.

I spent half my childhood in the shadows. Hiding from my father or my brother. Creeping from a place of solitude to another. Seeing while unseen, and pretending I was a part of what I...

You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain’t long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.

The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up...

All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria....

I just think TV is becoming more and more interesting in a way. Films are more and more derivative, you know, whether it’s ‘Transformers 2’ or ‘Shrek 5’, or it’s yet another iteration of another...

What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men?...

I used to love to hear stories of that man’s exploits! One of my heroes, when I was young. Riding round the enemy, harassing his lines of communication, falling on the baggage train and whatnot.”The...

Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.

Hurray’, shouted Glokta. ‘Porridge again!’He looked over at the motionless Practical. ‘Porridge and honey, better than money, everything’s funny, with porridge and honey!

Luck is a woman. She’s drawn to those that least deserve her.

A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance

Sometimes when I’m really enjoying a book, I’ll read a sentence or paragraph and just think – how can someone’s head be wired in such a way that they’d come up with that?

If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways,...

Inquisitor Lorsen’s thin lip curled. “There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the...

There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

Lorsen shook his head in amazement. ‘You truly are disgusting.”I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who...

The best steel doesn’t always shine the brightest.

That’s what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with...

Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same...

Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.

The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do…

My name is Nicomo Cosca, famed solider of fortune, and I am here for dinner.