Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayerswas a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator, and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth13 June 1893
mother book writing
you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.
writing want obscure
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
jobs writing thinking
I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.
running writing air
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
book writing impossible
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.
british-author goes less older toward
As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom.
british-author human mankind
A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.
mistake expression literature
make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.
running horse stupid
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.
principles realizing middle
The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles.
giving generations citizens
The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.
kings forever honor
Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints.
love mean men
To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.
dream night garden
I am better off with vegetables at the bottom of my garden than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream.