“I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.”

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No … eight days a week.

I always woke up before the plane landed.

All of it! – was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

One that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.

Liberals have always been the most fervent Imperialists.

Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.

I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother’s house was filled with English books.

Whenever I’m out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think.

During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people’s creations.

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven.

The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.

If poisons were ponies, I’d put my money on cyanide.

Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.

I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.