Detective Fiction Authors

"Lord Peter Wimsey: A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."

"The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth."

"It pays to advertise! - her best-known slogan for S. H. Benson's, then one of Britain's most prominent advertising firms (Mitzi Brunsdale, Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Berg, 1990, p. 194)"

"A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."

"What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person."

"Somehow or other, and with the best of intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame."

"Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds."

"The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadliness of principles. (Ch. 21)"

"And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you — I am at rest with you — I have come home."

"Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word 'daffydown-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it."

"What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it – that is at the bottom of the ψευδῆ λέγειν ὡς δεῖ."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless."

"Harriet Vane: But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job? Miss de Vine: Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: It’s my belief most of us would only be too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it won’t do to say so. (on Remembrance Day observances)"

"Freddie Arbuthnot*: "...mild old gentlemen do sometimes break out into a spot of tut-tuttery.""

"Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Everybody suspects an eager desire to curry favour, but rudeness, for some reason, is always accepted as a guarantee of good faith. The only man who ever managed to see through rudeness was Saint Augustine."

"Mr. Hankin: ...the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Wait a second... I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important. Lady Mary Wimsey: Everything I say is useful and important."

"Mr. Ingleby: You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: She has a sense of humor... and brains... life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed... and that would be jolly too."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window."

"Harriet Vane: If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle."

"The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world."

"Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes."

"Harriet Vane: I know what you're thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody."

"What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered — 'Wilkie! have a mission.'"

"He is very suggestive, and exceeding quick to take my notions. Being industrious and reliable besides, I don't think we should be at an additional expense of £20 in the year..."

"Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service."

"Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper."

"We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality."

"I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man."

"Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way."

"My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody."

"The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared."

"No man under Heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace — they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship — they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel."

"I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change—to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are."

"The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason"

"We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast."

"A very remarkable work... in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman."

"Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death."

"Rosanna Spearman had been a thief, and not being of the sort that get up Companies in the City, and rob from thousands, instead of only robbing from one, the law laid hold of her, and the prison and the reformatory followed the lead of the law."

"I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves."