"She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away."

"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."

"Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?"

"While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern."

"Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be."

"People who make some other person part of their job are dangerous."

"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."

"(One character on another:) "Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?"

"The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity, and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity."

"Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him."

"In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die."

"This is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also."

"It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself."

"The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second."

"Every woman is a human being-one cannot repeat that too often-and a human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."

"He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain."

"We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served."

"People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts."

"In the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite."

"I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home."

"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."

"How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant."

"After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays."

"You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out."

"The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come."

"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."

"Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection."

"What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him."

"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."

"There were crimson roses on the bench, they looked like splashes of blood."

"I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking."

"See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort."

"Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them."

"At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature!"

"Don't be so damned discouraging," said Wimsey. "I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me.""People have been wrongly condemned before now.""Exactly; simply because I wasn't there.""I never thought of that."

"Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere."

"I give you full credit for the discovery, I crawl, I grovel, my name is Watson, and you need not say what you were just going to say, because I admit it all."

"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."

"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 have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether."

"On marriage and permanent attach."

"In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak."

"She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra."

"There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks."

"Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the SA vres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediAval painting."

"I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don't you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an' suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit -- not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind."

"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."

"To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh, to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door."

"The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless."