You want beauty,' said Hercules Poirot. 'Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth. I want always truth.

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.

Sometimes in the quest for enlightenment the only thing that gets lighter is your wallet.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

For true success ask yourself these four questions: Why? Why not? Why not me? Why not now?

You can only go forward by making mistakes.

Christianity is reasonable in virtue of the impossibility of the contrary.

I like that idea that what I do might be mainstream. Might be.

An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Artie travels all the time. The rehearsals were just miserable. Artie and I fought all the time. He didn't want to do the show with my band; he just wanted me on acoustic guitar.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.