There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

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

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.

Everything in a story should be credible.

Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.

I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.

If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.

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.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.