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 theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.

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

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

Love is like the measles, all the worse when it comes late.