Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

First law of gossip - there's no point knowing something if somebody else doesn't know you know it.

He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I'm not a country person. I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

You know there's always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

So magic is real,’ I said. ‘Which makes you a … what?’‘A wizard.’‘Like Harry Potter?’Nightingale sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not like Harry Potter.’‘In what way?’‘I’m not a fictional character,’ said Nightingale.

The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop

The world was different before the war,' he said. 'We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.