The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.