Jeff Lindsay quotes:

If you look at Victorian England, being a soldier was considered a noble profession.

I'm a very neat monster." ~Dexter Morgan

A single moment spent in a business meeting or at a pub is more than enough to reveal the basic human truth that we are all faking it most of the time.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

The first rejection that 'Dexter' got, I was like, 'OK. This hasn't worked. Let's try something else. I'll go get a teaching job or something.'

Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

I question every word; I write 'the' and immediately feel scorn. It's such an ordinary word - everybody uses it - why can't I come up with something original? In the sunlight, every single word seems hackneyed.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

No TV show in history, no movie ever made - nothing you can imagine as being written or filmed or performed can turn a normal human being into a Dexter.

I wanted Dexter to have a family that could love him and understand him.

I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.

Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.

Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them.

It was such an unexpected and genuine smile that if I only had a soul I'm sure I would have felt quite guilty.

My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.

We're predators; we don't eat meat because it's handy, we eat meat because we have a taste for blood.

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?

I know family comes first, but shouldn't that mean after breakfast?

Life teaches us that human thought almost never walks hand in hand with logic, and it is usually counterproductive to raise the point.

I had killed our careful relationship by driving my tongue through its heart and pushing it off a cliff.

the faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception,

In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toin and suffering.

I wish to God I was organized enough to tell you that, 'Yes, there will be 14 books, and this one will go here, and that one will go there'... but to be honest, I hardly know what I'm going to do when I get up in the morning.

Life would certainly be easier if we all came equipped with our own personal FAQ lists. When we meet someone, we could pass them a business card with the list on the back, and then step back and let them read before we tried to talk.

Later, in the afternoon, I read what I did that morning. It's almost always a surprise. But I can read it rationally; edit, polish, re-write, and think what I might do tomorrow in the early darkness.

I know a lot of law officers, and every single one of them faces a moment - usually after about three hours on the job - when they realise that there's no connection between law and justice. The law, as an institution, avoids justice, subverts it, just as often as it sees it done.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

Hope is for people who can't see the Truth.

First things first has always been my motto, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense - after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble minded, not to provide any actual meaning.

...the only light in this tiny-mooned night comes from the windows of the apartment building, a matching purple halo from each window, a dozen televisions all tuned to the pointless, empty, idiotic unreality o the same reality show, everyone watching in vacuous lockstep as true reality cruises slowly past outside licking its chops"

As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.

It's always me, isn't it? I'm not really a very nice person, but for some reason it's always me that they come to with their problems.

I looked around the store and what I saw was not very encouraging. There were rows and rows of violent toys...aisle after aisle of training devices for recreational slaughter. No wonder our world was such a mean and violent place...if we teach children that killing is fun, can we really be surprised if now and then someone is smart enough to learn?

A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches

A man can take only so much. Even a phony man like me.

I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.

Every major city has a section like this one. If a piebald dwarf with advanced leprosy wants to have sex with a kangaroo and a teenage choir, he'll find his way here and get a room. When he's done he might take the whole gang next door for a cup of Cuban coffee and a medianoche sandwich. Nobody would care, as long as he tipped.

Oh, I wanted this killer stopped, brought to justice, yes, certainly - but did it have to be so soon?

Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?

Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch?

I am unlovable...I have tried to involve myself in other people, in relationships, and even - in my sillier moments - in love. But it doesn't work. Something in me is broken or missing and sooner or later the other person catches me Acting or one of Those Nights comes along.

It was almost enough to make me feel emotion.

When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.

And I was having too much fun to stop now.

The key to a happy life is to have accomplishments to be proud of and purpose to look forward to, and at the moment I had both. How wonderful it was to be me.

I try to write as serious as possible, and then a joke slips in.

It's terrible to have to depend on someone else.

What a terrible thing life can be.

After a long moment I closed the freezer door. I wanted to lie down and press my cheek against the cool linoleum. Instead I reached out with my little finger and flipped the Barbie's head. It went thack thack against the door. I flipped it again. Thack thack. Whee. I had a new hobby.

They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it.

Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you~?

I nodded with genuine synthetic sympathy.

...being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain.

My father was one of the first six guys ashore on Iwo Jima. He's 86 years old now, and every single night of his life, he has nightmares, and he wakes yelling.

A single moment spent in a business meeting or at a pub is more than enough to reveal the basic human truth that we are all faking it most of the time. We congratulate a rival on a triumph when actually we are choking on spite. We are cordial and attentive to crashing bores.

I certainly try to avoid getting bogged down in forensics. There is certainly a whole lot of other writers who know a lot more than me about it. I know enough about it to do a little bit of background on laboratory techniques and stuff. But it kind of bores me.

Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they're quick to say, 'Put them to death,' or scream 'capital punishment.'

I don't agree with capital punishment as it is now, because too often mistakes are made. But I think that if you eliminate the mistakes, then there are times when it is justified.

Dexter' has been very, very good to me. I would rather stop doing it than cheapen it.

Pretending is the basis of civilised society, and it is sometimes necessary for all of us. Without it we are nothing more than a pack of snarling dogs.

It was a tremendous stroke of good luck that the show got Michael C. Hall to play the part. Everyone I've talked to thinks Michael is a perfect 'Dexter,' which never happens.

Someone who is not a killer is not going to watch a TV show and decide to be a killer.

I was expecting someone dark to play 'Dexter' - someone like Johnny Depp.

I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

No big deal. We all have blood in us, the trick is keeping it inside.

Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.

I often find myself in situations where it seems to me like everyone else has read the instruction book

Life's only obligation, afterall, was to be interesting.

But as I have noticed on more than one occaision, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.

Mutilated corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. I got dressed and went to work.

I don't do my job to catch the bad guys. Why would I want to do that? No, I do my job to make order out of chaos.

It's that moon again, slung so fat and low in the tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter's hypothetical soul. That rascal moon, that loudmouthed leering Lucifer, calling down across the empty sky to the dark hearts of the night monsters below, calling them away to their joyful playgrounds.

We can't always do what we think we have to do. So when there's nothing else you can do, you wait... No matter what... pressure... you might feel.

She really did like me, the idiot.

Money to me had always been merely something the sheep used to show each other how wonderful they were.

I did not like this feeling of having feelings.

I'm quite sure more people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake all of it." --Dexter

I was never more alive than when the Dark Passenger was driving.

I really am guilty, of many somethings, all of them lethal and very enjoyable and technically not quite legal.

But of course, there's no rest for the wicked, which I certainly am; as I said, no rest for the wicked.

Killing makes me feel good.

It really is better to be lucky than to be good.

It was clear to me that it wouldn't matter what I did - they would never truly appreciate me or learn what I had to offer. They were far beyond fickle - they were insensible, like kittens,predatory little things, distracted by the first bit of string or shiny bauble that rolled across the floor, and nothing I could ever say or do could possibly make any kind of dent in their willful ignorance.

Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.

Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth - it's just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation.

Now I know what it is like to feel like a total idiot.

you can't use logic on human behavior.

And once again I found myself wondering, as I drifted off to stunned and unbelieving sleep:How do these terrible things always happen to me?

I mean, really: what kind of person could possibly dislike me?

And as always seems to happen when I have reached the point where I am ready to take decisive action, everything began to happen at once.

The mind picks some very bad times to take a walk doesn't it?

In its own way the kiss had been an act of murder.

Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.

I think people understand things different when they get older. It's not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I'm just understanding things different. Better.

"¦a cheerful black shadow reared up behind him as he spoke, thundering a happy challenge to my Dark Passenger, which slid forward and bellowed back.

Really now: If you can't get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?

It happens; incompetence is rewarded more often than not.

I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was suffocating.

A reasonable being might think that he and I could find some common ground; have a cup of coffee and compare our Passengers, exchange trade talk and chitchat about dismemberment techniques. But no: Doakes wanted me dead. And I found it difficult to share his point of view.

Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic.

It's an odd term, 'girlfriend,' particularly for grown persons. And in practice it provides an even odder concept. Generally speaking, in adults it described a woman, not a girl, who was willing to provide sex, not friendship. In fact, from what I had observed it was quite possible for one to actively dislike one's girlfriend, although of course true hatred is reserved for marriage.

For my part, my interest in Paris had faded away completely long ago when I learned that it was in France.

This was just no fun. I wanted my brain back.

And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.

I think that's nice, and if I could have feelings at all I would have them for Deb.

Me, feeling. What a concept.

Nothing else loves me, nor ever will. Not even - especially - me. I know what I am and that's not a thing to love.

I enjoyed watching good-looking idiots looking at each other. A great spectator sport.

And so as much as I can, I care about her, dear Deborah. It's probably not love, but I would rather she were happy.

Or was he saying, "Hi! Wanna play?" And I did. Of course I did.

I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities.

The whole point of wearing a disguise was to be seen wearing her.

But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.

What do you want a clock for?" "To find out what time it is," I said. "I think that's the usual purpose.

Perhaps because I'll never be one, humans are interesting to me.

...my conscience has the same hard reality as a unicorn.

Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story.

It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all.

And what did you do last night, Dexter? Oh, I played with my dolls while a friend chopped up my sister.

...she opened the door very slowly and carefully, half hiding behind it, as if badly frightened of what might be waiting for her on the other side. And considering that it was me waiting, this showed rare common sense.