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Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes: 6

  • Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.

  • Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.

    The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
  • If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.

    Gaudy Night
  • The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

    Gaudy Night
  • To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

    The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
  • The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second.

    Whose Body?