...it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night.
Arthur Conan DoyleThe larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.
Arthur Conan DoyleDraw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.
Arthur Conan DoyleIt has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?
Arthur Conan DoyleFor strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
Arthur Conan DoyleThere is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.
Arthur Conan Doyle