No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

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

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

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.

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.