Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

Useless as a pulled tooth.

my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas ... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.