Quotes

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

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.

Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.

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

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

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

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

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

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

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

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 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.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

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

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

Regarding her ability to "grind out" the number of stories she did: "I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine."

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

On childhood: One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood.

On experience: We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then.

On the opening of the play 'The Mousetrap' on the 6th October 1952 'I think we might get a nice little run out of it' Now in it's 66th year in London's West end It's still running.

[on concocting whodunnits] Years ago I got my plots in the tub, the old-fashioned rim kind - just sitting there thinking, undisturbed, and lining the rim with apple cores.