“There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”
“As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.”
“One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don’t, the story is spoiled.”
“A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.”
“Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.”
“Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.”
“Everything in a story should be credible.”
“Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.”
“I have a strong moral sense – by my standards.”
“I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.”
“I still can’t decide which is more fun – reading or writing.”
“I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.”
“If I’m home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.”
“The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.”
“The minute those two little particles inside a woman’s womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.”
“To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.”
“To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man’s decisions are based on his rational process. That I don’t believe at all.”
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