The things young women read nowadays and profess to enjoy positively frighten me.

It had come about ex­act­ly in the way things hap­pened in books.

What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn't be so busy looking for it in other people's.

One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone.

People should be interested in books, not their authors.

It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely. (Hercule Poirot)

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]