No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.

Well.” Wolfe was judicious. “You were not under oath. The police have been lied to informally many times by many people, including me. The right to lie in the service of your own interests is...

To assert dignity is to lose it.

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene.[An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]

The only difference between me and most people is that I’m perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide...

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they...

If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you’re surprised if a National Chairman calls you to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you’re...

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

Yeah. I’m the fly in the soup. I don’t like it any better than you do. Flies don’t like being swamped in soup, especially when it’s hot.

Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It’s childish.

Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.

I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of...

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.

You can’t dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art’s sake, but it can’t be cheerful.

You are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn’t real. It’s real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if...