It is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world.
To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
The trouble with psychology is that it doesn’t take human nature into account.
I’ve had two proposals since I’ve been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.
To be a classic, a novel should be original.
Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.
There are only two periods in a woman’s life when she hopes to be taken for older than she is, under sixteen and over ninety.
Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.
I think about death every day – what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.
I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel sorry for my psychopaths, because I do.
While most of the things you’ve worried about have never happened, it’s a different story with the things you haven’t worried about. They are the ones that happen.
It’s living – a broad spectrum of living – that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.
Nobody really lives in the present.
We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.
Ten thousand years of civilization shed in an instant when you put a woman behind the wheel of a car.
I get a lot of letters from people. They say “I want to be a writer. What should I do?” I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.
When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and the secrets of your heart, as well as possessions.
I can’t exist without books.
The knives of jealousy are honed on details.
Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one’s other self listening.