Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976)
English author of detective fiction.
I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.
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 don't pretend to be an author or to know anything about writing. I'm doing this simply because Dr Reilly asked me to, and somehow when Dr Reilly asks you to do a thing you don't like to refuse.
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.
"It is the kind of thing that happens to you when you are stupid," said Esa. "Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them."
John, forgive me... for what I can't help doing.
I have a certain experience of the way people tell lies.
Men always tell such silly lies.
Any medical man who predicts exactly when a patient will die, or exactly how long he will live, is bound to make a fool of himself. The human factor is always incalculable. The weak have often unexpected powers of resistance, the strong sometimes succumb.
I was wrong about that young man of yours. A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can't help looking like a sheep. Now, whenever that young man looked at you he looked like a sheep. I take back all I said this morning. It is genuine.
Exactly! It is absurd — improbable — it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! one cannot escape from the facts.
"You know that in all tombs there is always a false door?"
Renisenb stared. "Yes, of course."
"Well, people are like that too. They create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is a bare rock ... And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself."
Oh dear, I never realized what a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder!
Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money — or because the heart aches. L´amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?
I did not deceive you, mon ami. At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself.
I have always been so sure — too sure... But now I am very humble and I say like a little child: "I do not know..." ~ Hercule Poirot
This, Hastings, will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case — and my most interesting criminal.
I have no more now to say. I do not know, Hastings, if what I have done is justified or not justified. No — I do not know. I do not believe that a man should take the law into his own hands... But on the other hand, I am the law! As a young man in the Belgian police force I shot down a desperate criminal who sat on a roof and fired at people below. In a state of emergency martial law is proclaimed.
An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.