... 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.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

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

I suppose it is because woman's courage is mental and man's physical, that in times of great strain women always make the better showing.

There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger.

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