Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.

He spent his life immersed in books to the cost of everything else, even personal relationships. "Friends," he'd once said, "are probably great, but I have forty thousands friends of my own already, and each of them needs my attention.

If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad.

Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don't make mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.

Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth.

Scientific thought - indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else - is just like the fashions that we wear - only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band.