For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

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.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

[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.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

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.

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