Excerpts From Hannible by Thomas Harris
From Chapter 12
Clarice Starling visits Barney Matthews to ask him if he knows the whereabouts of Hannible's papers and artwork.
"Barney, after you turned over Dr. Lecter to the Tennessee people --"
"They weren't civil to him."
"After you --"
"And they're all dead now."
"Yes. His keepers managed to stay alive for three days. You lasted eight years keeping Dr. Lecter."
"It was six years -- he was there before I came."
"How'd you do it, Barney? If you don't mind me asking, how'd you manage to last with him? It wasn't just being civil."
Barney looked at his reflection in his spoon, first convex and then concave, and thought for a moment. "Dr. Lecter had perfect manners, not stiff, but easy and elegant. In working on some correspondence courses he shared his mind with me. That didn't mean he wouldn't kill me any second if he got the chance - one quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better. In maximum lockdown you can't afford to forget that, ever. If you keep it in mind, you're all right. Dr. Lecter may have been sorry he showed me Socrates." To Barney, lacking the disadvantage of formal schooling, Socrates was a fresh experience, with the quality of an encounter.
...
"Did you talk with Dr. Lector a lot?"
"Sometimes he went months without saying anything, and sometimes we'd talk, late at night when the crying died down. In fact - I was taking these courses by mail and I knew diddly - and he showed me a whole world, literally, of stuff - Suetonius, Gibbon, all that."