And yet,” said Poirot, “suppose an accident-“”Ah, no, my friend-“”From your point of view it would be regrettable, I agree. But nevertheless let us just for one moment suppose it. Then, perhaps, all these here...

What a queer topsy turvy world it was. It used to be the man who went to the wars, the woman who stayed at home. But here the positions were reversed.

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie’s crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

The things young women read nowadays and profess to enjoy positively frighten me.

Your idea of a woman is someone who gets on a chair and shrieks if she sees a mouse. That’s all prehistoric.

Sensationalism dies quickly, fear is long-lived.

There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c’est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!

You don’t appreciate a faithful husband when you’ve got one,’ said Tommy.’All my friends tell me you never know with husbands,’ said Tuppance.’You have the wrong kind of friends,’ said Tommy.

Use that fluff of yours you call a brain.

I’m sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes. ‘The modern girl has a thoroughly businesslike attitude to life’ That sort of thing. It’s not a bit true! Some girls are businesslike and...

Eh bien, then, you are crazy, or appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you may be crazy.

Why didn’t they ask the Evans?

But when you say crazy, that describes very well what the general appearance may be to ordinary, everyday people.

The man who came into the room did not look as though his name was, or could have ever been, Robinson. It might have been Demetrius, or Isaacstein, or Perenna – though not one or...

Oh please tell me we’re not doing the Poirot thing again — the suspects in the library with the candlestick or whatever’.Max looked at him [DCI Cotton]. ‘Fruitcake in this case. And what would you...

Las mujeres, claro está, deben pensar en ellas mismas.

As a fan of Agatha Christie, I think a brilliant mystery novel would be trying to identify the meat contents in a McDonald’s hamburger.

¡El dinero es ridículo! ¡El crédito es ridículo! ¡Convenga usted en que la vida tiene mucho de ridículo!

Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.

When the sea goes down, there will come from the mainland boats and men. And they will find ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem on Indian Island.

The discovery of an interaction among the four hemes made it obvious that they must be touching, but in science what is obvious is not necessarily true. When the structure of hemoglobin was finally solved,...

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often...

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.