My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.

Our lawyers had their chat with the Supreme Court Justice, and promised to repast the chat to other members of the Supreme Court to find out whether they wanted to hear us out.

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

Who shot him? I asked. The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

The roof might fall in; anything could happen.