Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

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.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.