Quotes from Martha Grimes

I don't have to hang around a pub, really, to get an idea. I usually visit it once, get the layout, the atmosphere, the feel of it.

I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.

You can't be blocked if you just keep on writing words. Any words. People who get 'blocked' make the mistake of thinking they have to write good words.

The English inn stands permanently planted at the confluence of the roads of history, memory, and romance.

I have readers tell me that I must be bored, but that's not true. I am never bored with the characters. I like them.

There are people who read Tolstoy or Dostoevski who do not insist that their endings be happy or pleasant or, at least, not be depressing. But if you're writing mysteries - oh, no, you can't have an ending like that. It must be tidy.

He quickly stuffed the book between the cushion and the arm of the sofa. The title alone was enough to kill off brain cells: Within a Budding Grave.

Yes, but that's what grief often does: turns something impossible into something possible. Turns something unpreventable into the preventable.

Fear wearing black.' Definition of cool. Maybe it's also the definition of courage. Would she be courageous?".

Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust, Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.

He sometimes thought it a pity the United States hadn't the practice of parceling out peerages instead of taking the sometimes ruinous course of doling out high government offices to make good on campaign promises. So much better a baronet than a booby.

It was the sort of room that made you want to stand around in it and read for the rest of your life

Jury paused. "This is a onetime offer. It won't come again. Choose." Melrose prepared to laugh like hell, but managed only a bark. "Onetime offer? You mean if I don't take you up on either of these jobs here and now, you'l I never ask me again?" "That is correct." "Is this the most ridiculous conversation we've ever had?" "No, we've had more ridiculous.

Melrose winced. He lived in a world of dried-up pheasant and one-liners.

He felt the loss of something irreplacable, as if a thief had come out of the night, velvet-gloved and softly shod, and taken whatever it was away without Jury's ever having known, and slipped through the square

To his horror, Melrose saw that these were name tags she was now pinning to the Attaboys' clothing and that the other guests were wearing them. To his double horror, he saw her hand closing on his lapel. He shoved it away. Her smile-mask cracked. "But everyone's wearing them just to make it easier." "I'd much rather make it harder." He walked off toward the drinks.

It was either Kenya or staying with my nincompoop grandchildren. Ha! Leopards I'd sooner." Melrose waited for her to complete the sentence, but she was done with it.

And how did he ever think he'd get away with murdering me?" Her tone implied she must surely belong to that rare breed of mortals who must go unmurdered.

Society readily accepts that a father can't be expected to raise a child alone, without help; yet a mother is completely different. For a mother to claim she couldn't do it, well, that's unacceptable.

any particular idiot in mind?" "I do, indeed. If Tom was actually here on Monday, and he needed an alibi, well, man, he didn't have one!

So what's interesting? It ain't like he

Denzil Smith was not a particularly pious man, but he was a curious one, which made him excellent company for Lady Agatha Ardry. They were dependent on one another in the mindless way of two gibbons dedicated to picking fleas off one another's fur.

Emma, I want to tell you something about being right: being right is much harder than on a person than being wrong.

But I think I've learned a lesson and that is that you have to find your own answers on things. Even if they're wrong answers. The point is in the finding.