Patience and endurance were not virtues in a woman; they were necessities, forced on her. Perhaps some day things would change and women would renounce them. They would rise up and say: 'We are not patient. We will endure no more.' Then what would happen to the world?

there is no truly honest autobiography.

Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.

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.

Herbert used to say that he was as tight as the paper on the wall.

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.