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

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

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

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.