I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

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.

[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.