I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.