If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.

Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.

Certainly the Americans want to buy rights, but have no idea what to do with them.

I dare say that quite a few people have contemplated death for reasons that much later seemed to them to be quite minor.

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.

I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.