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.

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.

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

Everything in a story should be credible.

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

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

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

I have a strong moral sense – by my standards.

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.

I still can’t decide which is more fun – reading or writing.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.