"Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs."

"I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it."

"By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do."

"As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of the people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive."

"Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them all over London — they were the best invention Will had ever heard of."

"Indeed, there is a moment on the first CD — the electrifying opening to "I Got Loaded," which sounds like an R&B standard but isn’t — when you might find yourself asking whether anyone who has ever been smitten by pop music can fail to have his heart stopped by the chords, the swing, and, once again, Steve Berlin’s wonderfully greasy sax."

"Each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before."

"Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness."

"These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and ... and it was too late."

"And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile alot. I fear that at any moment I may kill somebody."

"What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?"

"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)"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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)"

"George Fentiman: What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax."

"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."

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

"Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver: It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things."

"Sir Impey Biggs: Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force."

"To the person who has anything to conceal — to the person who wants to lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest — to the person who asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name above others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London. Where no one knows his neighbour. Where shops do not know their customers. Where physicians are suddenly called to unknown patients whom they never see again. Where you may lie dead in your house for months together unmissed and unnoticed till the gas inspector comes to look at the meter. Where strangers are friendly and friends are casual. London, whose rather untidy and grubby bosom is the repository of so many odd secrets. Discreet, incurious and all-enfolding London."

"Bunter: My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away. Lord Peter Wimsey: Your mother, Bunter? Oh, I never knew you had one. I always thought you just sort of came along already-made, so it were."

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

"Lord Peter Wimsey: I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now."

"Lord Peter Wimsey: Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"Sir Impey Biggs: Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse."

"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."