“One little Indian left all alone, he went out and hanged himself and then there were none.”
Author detail
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, in the United Kingdom, the daughter of a wealthy American stockbroker. Her father died when she was eleven years old. Her mother taught her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16, she went to Mrs. Dryden's finishing school in Paris to study singing and piano. In 1914, at age 24, she married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. While he went away to war, she worked as a nurse and wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which wasn't published until four years later. When her husband came back from the war, they had a daughter. In 1928 she divorced her husband, who had been having an affair. In 1930, she married Sir Max Mallowan, an archaeologist and a Catholic. She was happy in the early years of her second marriage, and did not divorce her husband despite his many affairs. She travelled with her husband's job, and set several of her novels set in the Middle East. Most of her other novels were set in a fictionalized Devon, where she was born. Agatha Christie is credited with developing the "cozy style" of mystery, which became popular in, and ultimately defined, the Golden Age of fiction in England in the 1920s and '30s, an age of which she is considered to have been Queen. In all, she wrote over 66 novels, numerous short stories and screenplays, and a series of romantic novels using the pen name Mary Westmacott. She was the single most popular mystery writer of all time. In 1971 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Quotes
Showing 41-60 of 66
“One little Indian left all alone, he went out and hanged himself and then there were none.”
“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”
“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.”
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“I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.”
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“The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.”
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“I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother abo...”
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“I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.”
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“Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.”
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“It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.”
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“The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.”
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“There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.”
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“Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.”
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“The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves they don't give a damn.”
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“These little grey cells. It is up to them.”
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“One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.”
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“I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.”
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“One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.”
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“Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.”
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“Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.”
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“I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
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