There is no question of defence. I have always acted in accordance with the dictates of my conscience. I have nothing with which to reproach myself.

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.

Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.

I'm not 17 anymore. I still have some of the same sort of anger, but I have a sense of humor about it... a sense of being constructive with that anger.

I play harder when my family is watching.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Dogs and cats get put to sleep; hogs and cows get slaughtered.

absolute liberty ... tends to corrupt absolutely.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. And it was way to literal for me.

You must own it to play it.