Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society,…

- Allan Massie

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

- Allan Massie

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.

- Allan Massie

We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible.

- Allan Massie

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.

- Allan Massie

It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understa…

- Allan Massie