If you are to be Hercule Poirot, you must think of everything.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

The insights we receive when going silent, it's our gift to ourselves. Returning and living them, sharing them, that is our gift to the world.

Experience has tutored me well that most will lie or cheat to get the better hand. It's why I prefer solitude to social interaction. - Bethany

Love was like a stock, Lizzie realized. You gambled on its paying off in the long run—but it could just as easily cost you everything.

I can’t imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.

This is the idea that has made me...an anonymous figure in America...If you have children here tonight...they are NOT special.

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.

Without glasnost there is not, and there cannot be, democratism, the political creativity of the masses and their participation in management.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

My parents were both from extremely different backgrounds. My father's Italian, my mother was of Swedish descent. They're both first-generation Americans.