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.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.