If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it - often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.
I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.
I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.
That is what I mean. A bath! The receptacle of porcelain, one turns the taps and fills it, one gets in, one gets out and ghoosh - ghoosh - ghoosh, the water goes down the waste pipe!" "M. Poirot are you quite mad?" "No, I am extremely sane.
It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely. (Hercule Poirot)
No, my friend, I am not drunk. I have just been to the dentist, and need not return for another six months! Is it not the most beautiful thought? --Poirot