A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.