It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.

There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.

I am one of those people who are blessed, or cursed, with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it

Mourning is not forgetting... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.

One policeman may be a friend, but two are the Law.

It's pitch, sex is. Once you touch it, it clings to you.

I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.