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.
You can only really get under anybody’s skin if you are married to them.
What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn’t be so busy looking for it in other people’s.
Does the real thing ever have the perfection of a stage performance?
I can’t imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author’s business to write, not talk.
How often have I not heard a perfectly intelligent female says, in the tone of one clinching an argument, ‘Edgar says – ’ And all the time you are perfectly aware that Edgar is a perfect fool.
Never worry about what you say to a man. They’re so conceited that they never believe you mean it if it’s unflattering.
Desperate ills need desperate remedies.
Men don’t understand how their mannerisms can get on women’s nerves so that you feel you just have to snap.
Writers are diffident creatures – they need encouragement.
You’re shocked, Mr. Burton, at hearing what our gossiping little town thinks. I can tell you this – they always think the worst!
It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later. Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.
I like to inquire into everything. Hercule Poirot is a good dog. The good dog follows the scent, and if, regrettably, there is no scent to follow, he noses around – seeking always something that is not very nice.
The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself.
Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.