This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

I have always had West Highland terriers.

The world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

Love’s a disease. But curable.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

Read in order to live.

Nothing fails like failure.

The motto was “Pax,” but the word was set in a circle of thorns.

Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn...

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and...

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

Scarcely one person in a thousand is capable of tasting the happiness of others.

I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you.

What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don’t really know, but I rather think he was...

Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil.

Nature’s music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written. She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you’re not in that existential panic when you don’t have a novel at all.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week,...

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason.

I wouldn’t take the Pope too seriously. He’s a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian third.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

McCabe’s Law: Nobody has to do anything.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

The devil take me, if I think anything but love to be the object of love.

Saddle your dreams before you ride em.

Life should be embraced like a lover.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

A rich man without charity is a rogue; and perhaps it would be no difficult matter to prove that he is also a fool.

You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.

The stitch of a book is its words.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I’ve written, regardless of time and place.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.

One fool at least in every married couple.

Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

Nobody has to do anything.

Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.