Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBEwas an English crime novelist, short story writer and playwright. She also wrote six romances under the name Mary Westmacott including Giant's Bread, but she is best known for the 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections that she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigative work of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Parker Pyne, Ariadne Oliver, Harley Quin/Mr Satterthwaite and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 September 1890
CityTorquay, England
I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.
I don't know. I don't know at all. And that's what's frightening the life out of me. To have no idea....
Ideas are like everything else. They've got to be marketed.
It's no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius- some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman - a tradesman in a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas, but you must submit them to the discipline of form.
Words, madmoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.
Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.
Sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely , racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just being alive is a grand thing.
I know there's a proverb which that says 'To err is human,' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.
Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time thewish to kill-though not the will to kill.
But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.
Nobody believes in magicians any more, nobody believes that anyone can come along and wave a wand and turn you into a frog. But if you read in the paper that by injecting certain glands scientists can alter your vital tissues and you'll develop froglike characteristics, well, everybody would believe that.
To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure. [author's dedication]
There hung about her the restrained energy of a whiplash.
It is deplorable...to remove all the romance - all the mystery!