John Burdett Quotes

“Your fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of your fear of letting go.”

— John Burdett

“You don't understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha. What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way”

— John Burdett

Don't ask me when I first mastered the obvious.

— John Burdett

“I don't want enlightenment, I want him. Sorry Buddha, I loved him more than you.”

— John Burdett

“The sound she is making is the sound hearts make after they're in
pieces and the fragments dissolve into the overwhelming sadness of the
universe. The power to hear it may be the only privilege of the
thoroughly dispossessed.”

— John Burdett

“We do not look on death the way you do, farang. My closest colleagues grasp my arm and one or two embrace me. No one says sorry. Would you be sorry for a sunset?”

— John Burdett

“The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.”

— John Burdett

“On a whim, Pisit calls the monk back to ask what he thinks of all this, and Western culture in general. After his drubbing just now he is in a Zen-ish sort of mood, not to say downright sarcastic: 'Actually, the West is Culture of Emergency: Twisters in Texas, earthquakes in California, windchill in Chicago, drought, flood, famine, epidemics, war on everything - watch out for that meteor and how much longer does the sun really have? Of course, if you didn't believe you could control everything, there wouldn't be an emergency, would there?”

— John Burdett

“Bangkok is one of the world's great cities, all of which own red-light districts that find their ways into the pages of novels from time to time. The sex industry in Thailand is smaller per capita because the Thais are less coy about it than many other people. Most visitors to the kingdom enjoy wonderful vacations without coming across any evidence of sleaze at all”

— John Burdett

“Lumpini Park at night: love at its cheapest, but the incidence of HIV is said to be over 60 per cent. In the darkness: furtive movement on benches and on the grass, muted moans and whispers, rustlings of large animals in heat, the intensity of the atomic fusion of sec and death (highly addictive, they say).”

— John Burdett

“I am moonlighting for the Buddha.”

— John Burdett

“Farang, I'll bet you Wall Street against a Thai mango he'll be back, if for no other reason than to play the card of virile youth against Hudson's superior rank and thus restore his ego after that humiliating reprimand.”

— John Burdett

“Policing. You think you've got it tough. You don't have any idea how it was when I joined the force. The whole cake was divided down to the last crumb. The big boss got seventy percent, and the portions got smaller as you descended the totem pole. And no complaining. You learned to keep your mouth shut at all times - you wouldn't have survived the first week.
You see, what nobody tells you about capitalism is that its warlordism in disguise. That leaves the only job in the jungle worth having an apex feeder - the rest is slavery at various levels of discomfort. Socially, psychologically, we're still in the rain forest. - Colonel Vikorn”

— John Burdett

“It is quite amazing how hard the subconscious works when it is made to understand that this life is not a rehearsal, there is no safety net and no assurance of any final closure. It is also quite appalling to realize how catatonic the imagination can become when we hedge our bets, opt for the safer direction at every fork in the path.”

— John Burdett

“I think it is immensely difficult to get the U.S. interested in non-U.S. topics. I don't think this is because the average American reader is disinterested, but more because of publishers playing it safe: if a thriller based in L.A. is a sure winner, why spend money plugging one based in Paris - or Bangkok?”

— John Burdett

In essence, the Thai people are not materialistic at all. They're not in the least driven by the kind of ambition that drives us. The more I got to know them, and the more time I spent with them, the more I understood that this was a totally legitimate attitude to life, and why not?

— John Burdett

“I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.”

— John Burdett

“'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'”

— John Burdett

“Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id.”

— John Burdett

In Southeast Asia the world is understood to be a vast, complex network of interdependent relationships. So when global capitalism makes it impossible for small-time rice farmers to feed their families and make a living, it is a natural thing for anyone in the family who can find an alternative source of income to do so.

— John Burdett

“There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.”

— John Burdett

Expecting to be wrong about most things most of the time brings, finally, the kind of humility that leads to peace. I think.

— John Burdett

If the world is telling you you're successful, but you don't feel it, you might as well have failed.

— John Burdett

In the West, we've lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking.

— John Burdett

“The world other than as advertised can be an amazing place.”

— John Burdett

“To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind that has been forced to cultivate them.”

— John Burdett

“I'm fascinated by Buddhism. I adore Buddhism, and I read about it all the time, but I haven't formally become a Buddhist, although I don't really know why I haven't. I guess I feel I don't need to.”

— John Burdett

“Just studying Buddhism, then meditating and going to Buddhist monasteries, talking to Buddhist monks, combined with the Thai people themselves, changed the way I look at the world.”

— John Burdett

When you notice light seeping into your coffin, it's hard to go on pretending that you're still dead.

— John Burdett

“The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.”

— John Burdett