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"Nothing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature."
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"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
"People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence."
"Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."
Explore more quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers
"At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!"
"Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee."
"I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command."
"I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction "from the woman's point of view. To such demands, one can only say "Go away and don't be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle."
"To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)"
"I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job."Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures."
"Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by "Raffles" and "Sherlock Holmes," or the sentiments for which they stand. He belonged to a family which had never shot a fox. 'I am an amateur,' said Lord Peter."
"(One character on another:) "Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?"
"She had her image and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper-and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further."
"The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself."
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