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

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

I have a great deal of mind. It takes a long time to change it.

... 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.

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.

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

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