470 Quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers

Five minutes’ practice before the glass every day, and you will soon acquire that vacant look so desirable for all rogues, detectives and Government officials.

At twenty years of age, the old-fashioned schooling turned me out helpless, ignorant and dissatisfied. Forty years later I encounter the product of the new schooling – still more helpless, still more ignorant, and possibly not even dissatisfied.

It’s not the innocent young things that need gentle handling – it’s the ones that have been frightened and hurt.

Passion’s a good, stupid horse that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels on Sundays. But love’s a nervous, awkward, over-mastering brute; if you can’t rein him, it’s best to have no truck with him.

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.

Heaven deliver us, what’s a poet? Something that can’t go to bed without making a song about it.

We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are ‘called’ and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.

The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects – but does that always mean that they actually know more?

We may argue eloquently that ‘Honesty is the best Policy’ – unfortunately, the moment honesty is adopted for the sake of policy it mysteriously ceases to be honesty.