Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Lord Peter Wimsey: The first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody.

Lord Peter Wimsey: I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.

Harriet Vane: I know what you're thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling 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 feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.

The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world.

Lord Peter Wimsey: Wait a second... I'm not sure that you haven't said something useful and important.
Lady Mary Wimsey: Everything I say is useful and important.

Lord Peter Wimsey: Everybody suspects an eager desire to curry favour, but rudeness, for some reason, is always accepted as a guarantee of good faith. The only man who ever managed to see through rudeness was Saint Augustine.

Lord Peter Wimsey: Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it.

Lord Peter Wimsey: He dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons.

Mr. Hankin: ...the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client.

Mr. Ingleby: You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct.

Lord Peter Wimsey: I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.

Lord Peter Wimsey: Trouble shared is trouble halved.

Charles Parker: We don't want to make large and ignominious public mistakes.

Harriet Vane: If anybody does marry you it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle.

Lord Peter Wimsey: I'm told I make love rather nicely. Though I am at a bit of a disadvantage at the moment. One can't be too convincing at the other end of the table with a bloke looking in the window.