You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched.

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.

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

There's ways and ways of dyin'. Some is took, and some takes French leave, and others is 'elped out of life.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.