What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

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.

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.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.