Arliss

“I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train

“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
― Mark Twain

“I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.”
― Dashiell Hammett