Dorothy L. Sayers

The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second.

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.

Every woman is a human being-one cannot repeat that too often-and a human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman. But an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any force.

The worst sin-perhaps the only sin- passion can commit is to be joyless.

This recognition of the truth we get in the artist__ work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, __es, yes, very good, very true__hat__ just what I__ always saying._ I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.

What we make is more important than what we are particularly if making is our profession.