When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the...
There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren'...
Papa always said that in the beginning men and women roamed the world together, equal in strength - like lions and tigers -And giraffes? interpolated Colonel Race slyly. I laughed. Everyone makes fun...
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Hercule Poirot spread out his hands in his most foreign manner.
The Beddingfeld girl was deep in conversation with the missionary parson, Chichester. Women always flutter round parsons.
It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again.Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain the...
I had the firm conviction that, if I went about looking for adventure, adventure would meet me halfway. It is a theory of mine that one always gets what one wants.
I am not mad. I am eccentric perhaps--at least certain people say so; but as regards my profession. I am very much as one says, 'all there.
But Aunt Maureen makes smashing omelettes. Julia Upjohn.She makes smashing omelettes. Poirot's voice was happy. He sighed.Then Hercule Poirot has not lived in vain, he said. It was I who taught your A...
Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter.
Men don't want to be brothers - they may someday, but they don't now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube trai...
There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.
Youth is a failing only tooeasily outgrown.
When a man's neck's in danger, he doesn't stop to think too much aboutsentiment.
Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.
If the fact will not fit the theory - let the theory go
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Why shouldn't I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they're loved and wanted and then show them that it's all a sham.