Tom Holt quotes:

American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot, sunny day. It's never really caught on in the UK, probably because the last time we had a hot, sunny day was back in 1957.

It was irritating to have one's physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger.

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly; it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else.

In spite of really intense competition for the job, I'm still my own worst enemy.

Mostly I sit at home in the evenings watching the box and hoping that one day I'll evolve into plankton.

Mordak has the mental clarity to recognise that when it comes to running a bureaucracy, Elves can achieve a degree of blinkered ruthlessness that makes goblins look like teddy-bears.

When you're about to die, your whole life's supposed to flash before your eyes. When you fall in true love, on the other hand, what you see in the twinkling of an eye is your entire future.

The best definition of an immortal is someone who hasn't died yet.

Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don't usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there's nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.

Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.

Lawyers are predators in grey worsted

American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot

Telling lies is a bit like tiling bathrooms - if you don't know how to do it properly, it's best not to try.

I don't read the Sunday papers; or the dailies, either.

I try and do 2,500 words a day, every day of the year

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly; it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else

There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to - learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad - but I just didn't have the time.

Lawyers are predators in grey worsted.

Everything is out there if you know how to find it, and have the patience. I don't and haven't, but that's my problem

Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.

I don't read the Sunday papers; or the dailies, either

Not only had he lost the only girl he'd ever loved, he'd lost her in duplicate, like some heartbroken but highly efficient civil servant.

Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world.

After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?

Among the gods, there is a dispute as to which one of them originally thought of Christianity; or, as they call it, the Great Leg Pull. Apollo has the best claim, but a sizeable minority support Pluto, ex-God of the Dead, on the grounds that he has a really sick sense of humour. How would it be, suggested the unidentified god, if first we tell them all to love their neighbour, pack in the killing and thieving, and be nice to each other. Then we let them start burning heretics.

At any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance

Descartes' immortal conclusion cogito ergo sum was recently subjected to destruction testing by a group of graduate researchers at Princeton led by Professors Montjuic and Lauterbrunnen, and now reads, in the Shorter Harvard Orthodoxy: (a) I think, therefore I am; or (b) Perhaps I thought, therefore I was; but (c) These days, I tend to leave that side of things to my wife.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of

The best definition of an immortal is someone who hasn't died yet

There is that within a man that drives him ever onwards, just as the power of the seasons drives the roots of flowers into the hard earth; and so he decided, against his better judgment, to open his eyes and find out what was going to happen to him next.

There's nothing bad about reincarnation per se, it's basically a very good system, cost-effective and ecologically friendly.