It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

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.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

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.