I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.

Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.

Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes - they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

Very few of us are what we seem.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

Too much mercy... often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.