Quotes from Leslie Charteris

It was strange to realize that this was it, and it had happened to him at last, as it had always been destined to happen someday, and in an instant he was going to cheat to the back of the book for the answer to the greatest mystery of all.

He sat without moving while coffee and balloon glasses were set before them.

Dear,' he said, 'I'm not complaining. We don't live in a magnificent age, but I've done my best to make life magnificent as I see it – to live my ideal of the happy warrior. But you made that possible. You made me seek and fight for the tremendous things. Battle and sudden death – yes, but battle and sudden death in the name of peace and life and love. You know I love you, Pat .

Mallaby Road, Harrow, as the Saint discovered, was one of those jolly roads in which ladies and gentlemen live. Lords and ladies may be found in such places as Mayfair, Monte Carlo, and St Moritz; men and women may be found almost anywhere; but Ladies and Gentlemen blossom in their full beauty only in such places as Mallaby Road

suits of Anderson and Sheppard, the shirts of Harman, the shoes of Lobb, and self-refrigerating conscience can achieve.

There are half a dozen of the boys downstairs.' 'Can you stop him getting in ?' Donnell grinned. 'I could stop an army' he said. 'Can you stop the Saint ?

You asked God to help you, old boy,' she said. 'Why shouldn't I ask the men who have come?

Oh, God!' he groaned. 'God help me!

he wasn't a failure. He made for himself a world fit for himself to live in.

Once again the Saint had proved, to his own sufficient satisfaction, as he had proved many times in his life before, that desperate dilemmas are usually best solved by desperate measures and that intelligent foolhardiness will often get by where too much discretion betrays valour into the mulligatawny. And

The track at that time was not laid out with much regard for the audience. Superimposed on the existing runways of Oakes Field, the former airport of Nassau, and making the most possible use of the already paved surfaces, it meandered off into backwaters previously known only to aviators, with little regard for the perspective of the cash customers.

It was one of those situations in which Mr Teal habitually felt himself drowning in the turgid waters of an unfathomable Weltschmerz. He glowered at Simon

With his rakehell profile and impudent blue eyes, this was a statement of highly questionable validity, but she refrained from taking issue with it.

by occupation this man is an editor, and ever since the first Saint story he has never stopped pestering me to dig into my memory for more stories of the Saint. In fact, as you see, he will go so far as to try and initiate them.

I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal.

Do you think I'd carry a gun in a suit like this ? My tailor would throw a fit.

Let's see what you've got—as the actress said to the bishop

I hope I never live to see the day when the miserable quibbling hair-splitters have won the earth, and there's no more black and white, but everything's just a dreary relative grey, and every one has a right to his own damned heresies, and it's more noble to be broad-minded about your disgusting neighbours than to push their faces in as a preliminary to yanking them back into the straight and narrow way .

Regretfully, I have decided that if the Saint Saga must remain permanently in print in its entirety, then it can only do so in its original form.

the Saint did not seem to be aware that he was multiplying miracles with an easy grace that would have made a Grand Lama look like a third-rate three-card man.

Simon Templar was a man who couldn't help spreading melodrama all around him like an infectious disease.

And it is also the story of Norman Kent, who was his friend, and how at one moment in that adventure he held the fate of two nations, if not of all Europe, in his hands; how he accounted for that stewardship; and how, one quiet summer evening, in a house by the Thames, with no melodrama and no heroics, he fought and died for an idea.

Simon Templar, with the old careless swashbuckling days behind him, more stern and sober, playing bigger games than he had ever touched before – yet with the light of all the old ideals in blue eyes that would never grow old, and all the old laughing hell-for-leather recklessness waiting for his need.

While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue.