Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Murder, you see, is an amateur crime. I’m speaking of course of the kind of murder you have in mind – not gangster stuff. One feels, very often, as though these nice ordinary chaps had been overtaken, as it were, by murder, almost accidentally. They’ve been in a tight place, or they’ve wanted something very badly, money or a woman – and they’ve killed to get it. The brake that operates with most of us doesn’t operate with them.”

— Agatha Christie

452. “Sometimes what you think is an end is only a beginning. And that wouldn’t do at all.”

— Agatha Christie

453. “My good Japp, is it possible that you throw the mud in my eyes? I know well enough that it is the Chinaman you suspect. But you are so artful. You want me to help you – and yet you drag the red kipper across the trail.”

— Agatha Christie

454. “A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves.”

— Agatha Christie

455. “What an awful place to live in England is,... If it isn’t snowing or raining or blowing it’s misty. And if the sun does shine it’s so cold that you can’t feel your fingers or toes.”

— Agatha Christie

456. “He would like, really, to take a long holiday. But he couldn’t afford to do that. He could afford it financially, of course, but he couldn’t afford to drop out. You were soon forgotten nowadays.”

— Agatha Christie

457. “To know when to use the truth is the essence of successful deception.”

— Agatha Christie

458. “When the fact doesn’t meet the theory then let go the theory.”

— Agatha Christie

459. “She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read. Wonderful luck that was, Mrs. Oliver thought to herself.”

— Agatha Christie

460. “Really, I have no gifts – no gifts at all – except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”

— Agatha Christie

461. “A secret de Polichinelle is a secret that everyone can know. For this reason the people who do not know it never hear about it – for if everyone thinks you know a thing, nobody tells you.”

— Agatha Christie

462. “Men are like that... They remain boys...”

— Agatha Christie

463. “I’ve often noticed that once coincidences start happening they go on happening in the most extraordinary way.”

— Agatha Christie

464. “A ridiculous-looking little man. The sort of little man one could never take seriously.”

— Agatha Christie

465. “Sometimes one sees things clearly years afterwards than one could possibly at the time.”

— Agatha Christie

466. “It is completely unimportant,” said Poirot. “That is why it is so interesting,” he added softly.”

— Agatha Christie

467. “I have often had occasion to notice how, where a direct question would fail to elicit a response, a false assumption brings instant information in the form of a contradiction.”

— Agatha Christie

468. “So I suggest you cut the cackle and come to the horses.”

— Agatha Christie

469. “Madame, the most kind, the most amiable are not always the cleverest.”

— Agatha Christie

470. “All this red tape and form-filling. That’s what comes of a bureaucratic state. Can’t go where you like and do as you please anymore! Somebody’s always asking questions.”

— Agatha Christie

471. “Thought is yours only. Nobody can alter or influence the use you mean to make of it.”

— Agatha Christie

472. “I felt a distinct pleasure in passing on my own discomfiture.”

— Agatha Christie

473. “The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.”

— Agatha Christie

474. “With a shock Iris realized suddenly that it was the first time in her life she had ever thought about Rosemary. Thought about her, that is, objectively, as a person. She had always accepted Rosemary without thinking about her. You didn’t think about your mother or your father or your sister or your aunt. They just existed, unquestioned, in those relationships. You didn’t think about them as people. You didn’t ask yourself, even, what they were like.”

— Agatha Christie

475. “I have a certain experience of the way people tell lies.”

— Agatha Christie

476. “People are so proud of their wickedness. Odd, isn’t it, that people who are good are never proud of it?”

— Agatha Christie

477. “In fact,′ said Poirot, ’she stabbed him in the dark, not realising that he was dead already, but somehow deduced that he had a watch in his pyjama pocket, took it out, put back the hands blindly and gave it the requisite dent.”

— Agatha Christie

478. “Murder – the wish to do murder – is something quite different. It – how shall I say? – it defies God.”

— Agatha Christie

479. “There is something about the defencelessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless – so sure. So generous and so demanding.”

— Agatha Christie

480. “The human and personal element can never be ignored.”

— Agatha Christie

481. “What are murderers like? Some of them, have been thoroughly nice chaps.”

— Agatha Christie

482. “There hung about her the restrained energy of a whiplash.”

— Agatha Christie

483. “You shouldn’t shoot people,” said Lord Caterham in a tone of mild remonstrance. “You shouldn’t really. I daresay some of them richly deserve it – but all the same it will lead to trouble.”

— Agatha Christie

484. “She looked, Inspector Curry reflected, exactly as the relict of a canon of the Established Church should look – which was almost odd, because so few people ever did look like what they really were. Even the tight line of her lips had an ascetic ecclesiastical flavour. She expressed Christian Endurance, and possibly Christian Fortitude. But not, Curry thought, Christian Charity.”

— Agatha Christie

485. “The great merit of being a doctor,” said Sir Bartholomew, “is that you are not obliged to follow your own advice.”

— Agatha Christie

486. “The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided.”

— Agatha Christie

487. “She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.”

— Agatha Christie

488. “All three wore the air of superiority assumed by people who are already in a place when studying new arrivals.”

— Agatha Christie

489. “It’s very dangerous to believe people, I haven’t for years.”

— Agatha Christie

490. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” he observed as he sniffed round our ankles. “Excuse the noise, won’t you, but I have my job to do. Got to be careful who we let in, you know. But it’s a dull life and I’m really quite pleased to see a visitor. Dogs of your own, I fancy?”

— Agatha Christie

491. “Hasting – There are times when it is one’s duty to assert oneself.”

— Agatha Christie

492. “Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely.”

— Agatha Christie

493. “I successfully chloroformed a hedgehog that was entangled in the tennis net and so managed to release it.”

— Agatha Christie

494. “The two words expressed volumes.”

— Agatha Christie

495. “The out-of-date returns in due course as the picturesque.”

— Agatha Christie

496. “Wonderful things, horses. Never know what they will do, or won’t do.”

— Agatha Christie

497. “But it is one of the great consolations in nature that a man, however unattractive, will find that he is attractive – to some woman.”

— Agatha Christie

498. “Many children, most children, I should say, suffer from over-attention on the part of their parents. There is too much love, too much watching over the child.”

— Agatha Christie

499. “Sanity is the one unbelievable bore. One must be mad, slightly twisted – then one sees life from a new and entrancing angle.”

— Agatha Christie

500. “To feel admiration for a man all through one’s married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.”

— Agatha Christie