Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

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.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.