[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

the theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.