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Wickedness is its own punishment.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

When a crime is committed, only the victim and the victim's close circle experience the event as pain, terror, death. To people hearing or reading about it, crime is a metaphor, a symbol of the ancient battles fought every day: evil versus good, chaos versus order.

The danger chiefly lies in acting well; no crime's so great as daring to excel.

I read 'Crime and Punishment' years ago and don't recall the details of it, but I do retain a strong sense of the creeping paranoia and panic.

To err is human; but contrition felt for the crime distinguishes the virtuous from the wicked.

That's my sense of how crime works: that it's not any kind of calculated evil driven by the devil, but just control disintegrating.

I am interested in the ordinary sort of threat. I know that people are interested in things like serial killers and what have you, but actually, those aren't the sort of crimes that really happen very much. The sort of crimes that happen tend to be more of a domestic nature and quite banal, but the psychology behind them is always fascinating.