The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

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.

But surely for everything you have to love you have to pay some price.

Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.

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

Very few of us are what we seem.

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

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

The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

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

These little grey cells. It is up to them.

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.

Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.

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

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

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.

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.

Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he’s in love with her.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

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.

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.

The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves they don’t give a damn.

I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

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

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.