War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.

MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.

Opinions, from experts, cost money.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled.

What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.