What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.