Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love..

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter..

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of B….

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell..

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?.

It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get ou….

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order..

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war agains….

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in Engl….

A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable stan….

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure..

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. S….

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up..

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead..

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft..

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people..

I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emoti….

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life..

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment..

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal trage….