Great Throughts Treasury

"Where ignorance is bliss, a little learning is a dangerous thing."

"A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago."

"Courage is the antidote to danger."

"Dear Editor: It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check."

"If you started to write, you did it because you had an urge to express yourself. That urge is a part of you. It's still there."

"Murder is not perpetrated in a vacuum. It is a product of greed, avarice, hate, revenge, or perhaps fear. As a splashing stone sends ripples to the farthest edges of the pond, murder affects the lives of many people."

"Now listen, Lam, he said, youÂ’re a nice egg but youÂ’ve got yourself poured into the wrong pan."

"I still have vivid recollections of putting in day after day of trying a case in front of a jury, which is one of the most exhausting activities I know about, dashing up to the law library after court had adjourned to spend three or four hours looking up law points with which I could trap my adversary the next day, then going home, grabbing a glass of milk with an egg in it, dashing upstairs to my study, ripping the cover off my typewriter, noticing it was 11:30 p.m. and settling down with grim determination to get a plot for a story. Along about 3 in the morning I would have completed my daily stint of a 4,000 word minimum and would crawl into bed."

"I like what I like and not what I'm supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don't like."

"It's a damned good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check."

"The character I am trying to create for [Perry Mason] is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience."

"You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work performed, that men were given these tokens to hold until they needed the product of work performed by some other man, that anyone who tried to get a token without giving his best work in return was an economic counterfeiter. He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possibly - that too many men were trying to get lost of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible."