Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes

These are times of action. Men think and then act; sometimes, indeed, they simply act.

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

To the bottle! In infancy, the milk bottle; in our prime, the wine bottle; in our dotage, the pill bottle.

Natalie Spenser was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

Used to move so much, every time the chickens saw the team put in the wagon, they'd lie down on their backs and hold their legs up to be tied!

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.

I have always regarded divorce as essentially disagreeable, like castor oil, but necessary.

the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

The greatest weapon in the world ... is ridicule.

Men play harder than they work; women work harder than they play.

To men and women who want to do things, there is nothing quite so driving as the force of an imprisoned ego. . . . All genius comes from this class.

We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.

I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.

I suppose it is because woman's courage is mental and man's physical, that in times of great strain women always make the better showing.

Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

it's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

I suppose that we are only young, Chris, so long as we can forget. After that we merely remember!

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.

my family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

Men love a joke - on the other fellow. But your really humorous woman loves a joke on herself.

The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas ... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

[To her frequently needed plumber:] How would you like to be adopted? I'm sure it would be cheaper.

the theater is the only money-making business I know in which haste apparently rules from first to last.

Old men make wars that young men may die.

I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter.

Herbert used to say that he was as tight as the paper on the wall.

Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting himself after a night's sleep.

I have a great deal of mind. It takes a long time to change it.

There is nothing for the modern man or woman to fear about most cases of cancer. Nothing except delay.

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

Her eyes filled. "He forgot my birthday, two weeks ago, " she said. "It was the first one he had ever forgotten, in nineteen of them." Nineteen! Nineteen from thirty-five leaves sixteen!

The world doesn't come to the clever folks it comes to the stubborn obstinate one-idea-at-a-time people.

Love is like the measles. The older you get it the worse the attack.

To be kind to all to like many and love a few to be needed and wanted by those we love is certainly the nearest we can come to happiness.