you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.

A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

... to mention honor was to suggest its opposite.

But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.

I often think when a man's once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.

make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

Passion's a good, stupid horse that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels on Sundays. But love's a nervous, awkward, over-mastering brute; if you can't rein him, it's best to have no truck with him.