Robert Galbraith

Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?

Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.

Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.

One of the earliest and most vivid memories of Robin__ childhood was of the day that the family dog had been put down. She herself had been too young to understand what her father was saying; she took the continuing existence of Bruno, her oldest brother__ beloved Labrador, for granted. Confused by her parents_ solemnity, she had turned to Stephen for a clue as to how to react, and all security had crumbled, for she had seen, for the first time in her short life, happiness and comfort drain out of his small and merry face, and his lips whiten as his mouth fell open. She had heard oblivion howling in the silence that preceded his awful scream of anguish, and then she had cried, inconsolably, not for Bruno, but for the terrifying grief of her brother.

Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.

In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance.

Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country.

There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and to help. The price of all of those comfortable beds and home-cooked meals, however, would be to sit at kitchen tables, once the clean-pajamaed children were in bed, and relive the filthy final battle with Charlotte, submitting to the outraged sympathy and pity of his friends' girlfriends and wives. To this he preferred grim solitude, a Pot Noodle and a sleeping bag.

In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance. With a hundred million sperm swimming blindly through the darkness, the odds against a person becoming themselves were staggering.

She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nill

It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.

Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.

the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...

He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks....

He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the little town with its long smuggling history, where colorful houses tumbled down to the beach.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.