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Agatha Christie Quotes
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, was an English writer known for her sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which was performed in the West End from 1952 to 2020, as well as six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.

Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had one child before divorcing in 1928. During both World Wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons which featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays. Following her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, she spent several months each year on digs in the Middle East and used her first-hand knowledge of his profession in her fiction.

According to Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual author. Her novel And Then There Were None is one of the highest-selling books of all time, with approximately 100 million copies sold. Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the world record for the longest initial run. It opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End of London on 25 November 1952, and by September 2018 there had been more than 27,500 performances. The play was closed down in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award. Later that year, Witness for the Prosecution received an Edgar Award for best play. In 2013, she was voted the best crime writer and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the best crime novel ever by 600 professional novelists of the Crime Writers' Association. In September 2015, And Then There Were None was named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a vote sponsored by the author's estate. Most of Christie's books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games, and graphic novels. More than thirty feature films are based on her work. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. September 1890 – 12. January 1976
Agatha Christie photo
Agatha Christie: 320 quotes67 likes

Agatha Christie Quotes

“I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.”

Agatha Christie

LIFE magazine (14 May 1956)

“Freckles are so earnest and Scottish.”

Agatha Christie book The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger (1942)

“The character of the victim has always something to do with his or her murder.”

Agatha Christie

Murder for Christmas (1939, Holiday for Murder, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas)

“Yes, he is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all.”

Agatha Christie book The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

“Poirot twinkled at her gently.”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

“She broke off, unable to find words to frame her struggling thoughts. What life would be with Hori, she did not know. In spite of his gentleness, in spite of his love for her, he would remain in some respects incalculable and incomprehensible. They would share moments of great beauty and richness together - but what of their common daily life?”

Agatha Christie

(1945)

“God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings — not dummies! Be personal — be prejudiced — be catty — be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Dr Reilly
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

“Quite absurd, because Caleb has absolutely no taste for fornication. He never has had. So lucky, being a clergyman.”

Agatha Christie book The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger (1942)

“I am not very clever about Americanisms — and I understand they change very quickly.”

Agatha Christie

A Murder is Announced (1950)

“Perhaps a little of Trollope, but not to drown in him.”

Agatha Christie

A Murder is Announced (1950)

“It was the technique of a man who selected thoughts as one might select pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In due course they would be reassembled together so as to make a clear and coherent picture. At the moment the important thing was the selection, the separation.”

Agatha Christie book Third Girl

Third Girl (1966)

“You have an excellent heart, my friend — but your grey cells are in a deplorable condition.”

Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

“Handsome, strong, gay … She felt again the thro and lilt of her blood. She had loved Kameni in that moment. She loved him now. Kameni could take the place that Khay had held in her life. She thought: "We shall be happy together - yes, we shall be happy. We shall live together and take pleasure in each other and we shall have strong, handsome children. There will be busy days full of work … and days of pleasure when we sail on the River…Life will be again as I knew it with Khay…What could I ask more than that? What do I want more than that?"”

Agatha Christie book Death Comes as the End

Death Comes as the End (1945)

“Men are made fools by the gleaming limbs of women, and, lo, in a minute they are become discolored carnelians. A trifle, a little, the likeness of a dream. And death comes as the end.”

Agatha Christie

(1945)

““Darling,” she drawled, “won’t that be rather tiresome? If any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later!””

Agatha Christie book Death on the Nile

Death on the Nile (1937)

“How convenient if you could ring up Harrods and say ‘Please send along two good murderers, will you?”

Agatha Christie book The Pale Horse

The Pale Horse (1961)

“I aroused Judith’s contempt by asking what good all this was likely to do to mankind? There is no question that annoys your true scientist more.”

Agatha Christie

Source: Curtain - Poirot's Last Case (1975), chapter 7

“Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition--and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do--clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth--the naked shining truth.”

Agatha Christie book Death on the Nile

Hercule Poirot
Death on the Nile (1937)

“Pilar — remember — nothing is so boring as devotion.”

Agatha Christie

Murder for Christmas (1939, Holiday for Murder, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas)

“But how much are the delicate convolutions of the brain influenced by the digestive apparatus? When the mal de mere seizes me I, Hercule Poirot, am a creature with no grey cells, no order, no method — a mere member of the human race somewhere below average intelligence!”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

“Oh dear, I never realized what a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder!”

Agatha Christie

Spider's Web (1956)

“Is it coding — or code breaking? Is it like Deborah’s job? Do be careful, Tommy, people go queer doing that and can’t sleep and walk about all night groaning and repeating 978345286 or something like that and finally have nervous breakdowns and go into homes.”

Agatha Christie book N or M?

N or M? (1941)

“I have, perhaps, too professional a point of view where deaths are concerned. They are divided, in my mind, into two classes — deaths which are my affair and deaths which are not my affair — and though the latter class is infinitely more numerous — nevertheless whenever I come in contact with death I am like the dog who lifts his head and sniffs the scent.”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

““Jerry had an expensive public school education, so he doesn’t recognize Latin when he hears it,” said Joanna”

Agatha Christie book The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger (1942)

“When you were a child, I loved you. I loved your grave face and the confidence with which you came to me, asking me to mend your broken toys. And then, after eight years' absence, you came again and sat here, and brought me the thoughts that were in your mind. And your mind, Renisenb, is not like the minds of the rest of your family. It does not turn in upon itself, seeking to encase itself in narrow walls. Your mind is like my mind, it looks over the River, seeing a world of changes, of new ideas - seeing a world where all things are possible to those with courage and vision…”

Agatha Christie

Hori
(1945)

“Take this Hercules — this hero! Hero, indeed! What was he but a large muscular creature of low intelligence and criminal tendencies!”

Agatha Christie book The Labours of Hercules

The Labours of Hercules (1967)

“I have always been so sure — too sure… But now I am very humble and I say like a little child: "I do not know…"”

Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot
Curtain - Poirot's Last Case (1975)

“"Well", said Miss Marple. "Are you going to let her get away with it?" There was a pause, then Father brought down his fist with a crash on the table. "No", he roared — "No, by God I'm not!" Miss Marple nodded her head slowly and gravely. "May God have mercy on her soul," she said.”

Agatha Christie book At Bertram's Hotel

At Bertram's Hotel (1965)

“Two is enough for a secret.”

Agatha Christie book The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

“This, Hastings, will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case — and my most interesting criminal.”

Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot
Curtain - Poirot's Last Case (1975)

“I felt that the murderer was in the room. Sitting with us — listening. one of us”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Amy Leatheran
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

“I always feel that the young doctors are only too anxious to experiment. After they’ve whipped out all our teeth, and administered quantities of very peculiar glands, and removed bits of our insides, they then confess that nothing can be done for us. I really prefer the old-fashioned remedy of big black bottles of medicine. After all, one can always pour those down the sink.”

Agatha Christie

A Murder is Announced (1950)

“It is the kind of thing that happens to you when you are stupid," said Esa. "Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them.”

Agatha Christie book Death Comes as the End

Death Comes as the End (1945)

“There is no such thing as muddle — obscurity, yes — but muddle can exist only in a disorderly brain.”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

““Yes, Mr. Lee.” Superintendent Sugden did not wast time on explanations. “What’s all this?””

Agatha Christie

Murder for Christmas (1939, Holiday for Murder, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas)

“The tear rose in Miss Marple's eyes. Succeeding pity, there came anger - anger against a heartless killer. And then, displacing both these emotions, there came a surge of triumph - the triumph some specialist might feel who has successfully reconstructed an extinct animal from a fragment of jawbone and a couple of teeth.”

Agatha Christie book A Pocket Full of Rye

A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)

“"Eh bien, Mademoiselle, all through my life I have observed one thing — 'All one wants one gets!' Who knows?" His face screwed itself up comically. "You may get more than you bargain for."”

Agatha Christie book The Mystery of the Blue Train

Hercule Poirot
The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

“Miss Marple twinkled at me.”

Agatha Christie book The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger (1942)

“The crime is now logical and reasonable.”

Agatha Christie

Murder for Christmas (1939, Holiday for Murder, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas)

“Never mind. I knew — that was the great thing.”

Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

“Last time I had my hands on you, you felt like a bird - struggling to escape. You'll never escape now…”

Agatha Christie book Towards Zero

MacWhirter
Towards Zero (1944)

“They are so busy knocking that they do not notice that the door is open!”

Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

“See you, one should not ask for outside proof — no, reason should be enough. But the flesh is weak, it is consolation to find that one is on the right track.”

Agatha Christie book The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

“Because, Renisenb, it is so easy and it costs so little labour to write down ten bushels of barley, or a hundred head of cattle, or ten fields of spelt - and the thing that is written will come to seem like the real thing, and so the writer and the scribe will come to despise the man who ploughs the fields and reaps the barley and raises the cattle - but all the same the fields and the cattle are real - they are not just marks of inks on papyrus. And when all the records and all the papyrus rolls are destroyed and the scribes are scattered, the men who toil and reap will go on, and Egypt will still live.”

Agatha Christie

Hori
(1945)

“That was the worst of Dr Reilly. You never knew whether he was joking or not. He always said things in the same slow melancholy way — but half the time there was a twinkle underneath it.”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Amy Leatheran
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

“One forgets how human murderers are.”

Agatha Christie

A Murder is Announced (1950)

““Is he then an unhappy man?”
Poirot said:
“So unhappy that he has forgotten what happiness means. So unhappy that he does not know he is unhappy.”
The nun said softly:
“Ah, a rich man…””

Agatha Christie book The Labours of Hercules

The Labours of Hercules (1967)

“The old, you must remember, though considered incapable of action, have nevertheless a good fund of experience on which to draw.”

Agatha Christie book Third Girl

Third Girl (1966)

“I have the little idea, my friend, that this is a crime very carefully planned and staged. It is a far-sighted, long-headed crime. It is not — how shall I express it? — a Latin crime. It is a crime that shows traces of a cool, resourceful, deliberate brain — I think an Anglo-Saxon brain.”

Agatha Christie book Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express (1934)