Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven’t a chance of getting.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense.

(A murderer about their victim:)”He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.

It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words “justice,”...

What about his style?” asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted.”Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am...

Our parents’ generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must...

That He cares.

I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn’t a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or...

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held...

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.

The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.

I don’t want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can...

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at...

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.

Time didn’t heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than...

She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will...

Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.

Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to...

What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.

The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves’ eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world’s terrors.

Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.

Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it’s conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim’s Will...

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but...

All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can’t share either experience.

Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren’s home life wasn’t greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife’s feelings and deprive his...

Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was...

You won’t get love from a child if you don’t give love.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

What do you mean by sound government?’Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.’Then we...

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.

You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.

Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the...

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.