Eric Ambler

Eric Clifford Ambler OBE (28 June 1909 – 22 October 1998) was an English novelist and screenwriter who wrote thrillers, often featuring spies, international criminals, or "stateless" protagonists who were not acknowledged as citizens by any country. His protagonists were typically ordinary people.

• Power is for the powerful. Let power fall into the hands of the weak and the rest is tyranny.

• The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.
  • Chapter 2. Quoted in The New Yale Book of Quotations, p. 18.
• Greta is really a splendid cook and there is nothing Swiss about my wines.
• Latimer turned to watch the subject of these reflections carefully, almost lovingly, adjusting the coffee percolator, and thought how difficult it was to dislike a man when he was making coffee for you.
• Drug addicts, you know, are always very eager to get other people to take drugs too.
• If I had not made the money, someone else would have done so. Not one of those unfortunate creatures would have been any better off and I should have lost money.
• I think that, to begin with, he had intended to kill Dimitrios when he found him, but as he began to get short of money his hatred of Dimitrios became more reasonable.

• "Let us hope the bad times are ended for good," [said Mr. Tan.]
  "Good business for one is good business for all," said Girija.
  "Very true." Now, Mr. Tan decided, they were coming to the point. Reference to mutual advantage was the accepted preliminary to a squeeze.

• Hallett drew a deep breath. "Mr. Nilson," he said, "I wish you could tell me something. Why is it that when an apparently normal, intelligent, law-abiding citizen like you gets hold of a passport and a steamship ticket, he suddenly turns into a juvenile--"
  "Okay, Mr. Hallett," Greg broke in irritably. "You can't say anything I haven't already said to myself."

• It came down to this: if I hadn't been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police. I had no choice but to do what this man Harper told me. He was entirely responsible for what happened to me.

• In my experience, most people are extraordinarily careless about the way they look after traveler's checks. Just because their counter-signature is required before a check can be cashed, they assume that only they can negotiate it. Yet anyone with eyes in his head can copy the original signature. [...] People who leave traveler's checks lying around deserve to lose them.

• I think that if I were asked to single out one specific group of men, one type, one category, as being the most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable , petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language, I would say without any hesitation: "the people who run counter-espionage departments." With them, it is no use having just one story; and especially not a true story; they automatically disbelieve that. What you must have is a series of stories, so that when they knock the first one down you can bring out the second, and then when they scrub that out, come up with a third. That way they think they are making progress and keep their hands off you, while you gradually find out the story they really want you to tell.

• It is hard for a woman not to like very much an attractive, rich and intelligent older man who adores her and yet who does not lose his good sense and dignity by insisting that she adore him in return.

• Nicki, my wife, was off in Romania somewhere on a three-week tour with the rest of the troupe. She is an exotic dancer, and if anyone wants to know how it was that a man my age, still vigorous but admittedly a bit the worse for wear, came to have a Greek woman twenty years his junior for a wife, they must ask her. [...] A man is entitled to seek consolation, and an attractive woman is entitled to look for protection. I always handled her business affairs or her, and when she was in a good mood she called me "papa." I may add that Nicki worked because she liked to work, not because I made her do so. I took no commission. She was completely free to come and go as she pleased, and with whom she pleased. I asked no questions. I have regretted our enforced separation very deeply. I went through her things to see if there was anything I could sell.

• It had been a most unpleasant day. [...] We had been questioned and cross-questioned. [...] The police couldn't have been worse. The questioner was a suspicious and bloody-minded Frenchman who made it clear from the start that he regarded us as undesirables. [...] My passport was received with a mocking smile. The bastard wouldn't take our word for anything. We had to show our money and count it out before his eyes. Then the amounts were written in our passports. We were warned against attempting to find work, unless it was in a ship leaving Djibouti, or to engage in the drug traffic. We were told, finally, that if either of us was still in the territory seven days hence, he had better be able to swim.

• Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.

• By the failures of the world in which I move I have been accused in my time of possessing nearly all the anti-social qualities. It has been said that, both in my business and in my private lives, I have been consistently sly, treacherous, ruthless and rapacious, vindictive, devious, sadistic and generally vile. I could add to that list. But no one, no one, has yet suggested that I would like even condone a resort to violence by others, much less promote or organize the use of it myself.

• 'Bitter?' He grinned. 'Why on earth should I feel bitter? We were barbarians. You will note that I say "we". I include myself. What would we in our ignorance have done with so much old bird-crap, so much phosphate. Nothing. Our exploitation by the Powers was the best thing that ever happened to us. Even the American bombing was good. Simple people enjoy loud bangs.'

• They say that the Devil still quotes the scriptures

• He has a one-hundred-and-ten percent British accent. Only other guy I ever met with an accent like it is an Armenian with a Lebanese passport who works for Unesco and was educated at the English High School in Istanbul before going on to the Sorbonne.

• It is absolutely essential that you rid yourself of this absurd idea that I am a criminal or that I have criminal instincts. I am a lawyer who respects the law. Illegality is for the immature and the foolish. The wise man has no need of it.

• You, a British non-com, one of those upper-crust limeys whose voices make them sound as if they're pederasts even when they're not, could never be suspect.

• [W]hat use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one?

• 'May guests be permitted to know what fresh disaster now postpones our detailed examination of your criminal past?'
  'Certainly. The house is on fire.'

• The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week.
• In your profession you must have met lots of very rich self-made men, as rich as or even richer than Zander. They always tend to regard themselves as a little above the law, wouldn't you say?

• [Ambler's novels are] the well into which everybody had dipped
  • John le Carré. Quoted in Ambler's Los Angeles Times obituary