the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

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

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

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

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