Quotes

An archaelogist is the best husband a women can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.

If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles one would hardly see anybody.

Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.

Curious things, habits. People themselves never know they had them.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.

Regarding her ability to "grind out" the number of stories she did: "I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine."

On love: It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous, that you realize just how much you love them.

On childhood: One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood. I had a very happy childhood. I had a home and a garden that I loved; a wise and patient Nanny; as father and mother two people who loved each other dearly and made a success of their marriage and of parenthood.

On experience: We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then.

On the opening of the play 'The Mousetrap' on the 6th October 1952 'I think we might get a nice little run out of it' Now in it's 66th year in London's West end It's still running.

[on concocting whodunnits] Years ago I got my plots in the tub, the old-fashioned rim kind - just sitting there thinking, undisturbed, and lining the rim with apple cores.

We never know the whole man, though sometimes, in quick flashes, we know the true man. I think, myself, that one's memories represent those moments which, insignificant as they may seem, nevertheless represent the inner self and oneself as most really oneself.

Our house was truly a happy house. That was largely due to my father, for my father was a very agreeable man. The quality of agreeableness Is not much stressed nowadays. People tend to ask if a man is clever, industrious, if he contributes to the well-being of the community, if he 'counts' in the scheme of things.

I am today the same person as that solemn little girl with pale flaxen sausage-curls. The house in which the spirit dwells, grows, develops instincts and tastes and emotions and intellectual capacities, but I myself, the true Agatha, am the same. I do not know the whole Agatha. The whole Agatha, so I believe, is known only to God.

On her childhood in the early 20th century: Servants, of course, were not a particular luxury–it was not a case of only the rich having them; the only difference was that the rich had more. Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant, but they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.

To be part of something one doesn't in the least understand is, I think, one of the most intriguing things about life.