Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.