Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Opinions, from experts, cost money.
Everything in a story should be credible.
Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.
I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.
We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.
There's nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.
What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.
Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.
MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.
I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
A hole in the ice is dangerous only to those who go skating.
Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.
What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?
A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
I don't answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.
The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.
To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.
As between the intolerable and the merely distasteful, I must choose the latter.
Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.
Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.
No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.
I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know. (Nero Wolfe)
There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.
A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.
I like to walk around Manhattan, catching glimpses of its wild life, the pigeons and cats and girls.
It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.
Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.
The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.
Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.
The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.