Lee Child Quotes

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

The man in the street is always a stranger.

I have contact with no one involved in the trial.

When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

I was a guy who abandoned a TV show. I didn't care about people.

Fear invariably and universally induces disengagement, and disengagement is negative division of labor.

People who are employed in a way they don't like - my heart cries for them.

I don't worry anymore about where's the big hangout Tuesday night, Friday. Couldn't tell you and no one comes to me for advice anymore in those areas anymore, so real boring I would say.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

Traveling is one of few zones of experience where you are not directly plugged into the world around you. You're not part of the society you're passing through.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

I have X'd myself from your world.

There's probably no experience more alienating than fame, other than a terminal illness, where you actually find yourself in a situation that nobody around you can relate to.

The loneliest you will get is in the most public of arenas: You will go to a place and end up in the smallest compartment possible, because it's a distraction to everybody, and you end up not getting to enjoy it like everyone else.

I'm not a happy person when I'm working.

More and more, I find myself turning away from everything relating to contemporary society. I don't know how healthy it is, but I am creating a very private bubble that I live in.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

I am increasingly conscious of the plight in which men and women over forty who need work are finding themselves. …. It seems to me ludicrous that this situation should exist for at forty a man or woman should be at their best and have experience and poise and patience all of which should make meeting certain problems of work easier.

I've always just felt a little out of place. I still feel out of place in San Francisco. It's this place where everything is going great, and everyone feels super optimistic about the world. It's a little different about how I grew up.

Fame is very isolating. It changes your reality.

Some people go to their job. That's the job they have; they have to do it. They hate their boss and their coworkers, this and that. It's hard to get along.

I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.

My first two novels featured narrators who were aggressively unattached: They couldn't form any sort of genuine relationship. So I had thoroughly explored the geography of loneliness and isolation.

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

I feel like I'm in my own world: in the world but not a part of it.