If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it – often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.
If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.
We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary.
One does what one can, not what one cannot.
Don’t think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.
Of course I despise money when I haven’t got any. It’s the only dignified thing to do.
There are doubtless certain unworldly people who are indifferent to money. I myself have never met one.
Those who never think of money need a great deal of it.
The out-of-date returns in due course as the picturesque.
Nurses – nurses, you’m all the same. Full of cheerfulness over other people’s troubles.
The tragedy of life is that people do not change.
The whole thing was like a nine-month ocean voyage to which you never got acclimatized.
Everything has got its right size. When it is its right size and well run it’s the tops.
One place is very like another.
The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.
Wonderful things, horses. Never know what they will do, or won’t do.
Ideas are like everything else. They’ve got to be marketed.
Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.
If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.
What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn’t be so busy looking for it in other people’s.