Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. 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.

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.

some of the people with the best smiles are actually broken inside

The Christmas spiritwhispers softly in my ear, "Go be of good cheer.

You can't truly have an open heart until it's been broken.

I like my computer. But I don't know how to use it as well as the 10-year-old daughter.

317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.

More people write poetry than read it.

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

I see stardom very clearly as a construct that's been created in order to sell things.

Dumb people are just blissfully unaware of how dumb they are.