having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.

It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.

there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.

Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting himself after a night's sleep.

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.

... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.