1. "When in a light-hearted manner I set out, fifteen years ago, to write the first "Lord Peter" book, it was with the avowed intentions of producing something "less like a conventional detective story and more like a novel." Re-reading Whose Body? at this distance of time I observe, with regret, that it is conventional to the last degree, and no more like a novel than I to Hercules." (from "Gaudy Night" in The Art of the Mystery Story:208)2. The ordinary beginner had to proceed with caution and to acquire technical facility in the process. During the next ten years the technique of detective fiction did improve out of all knowledge in the hands of a number of brilliant writers, and we all became a great deal more careful about our facts. Some of us, from time to time, even indulged in a little "good writing" here and there and were encouraged to find it well received. We also took occasion to preach at every opportunity that if the detective story was to live and develop it must get back to where it began in the hands of Collins and Le Fanu, and become once more a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle. My voice was raised very loudly to proclaim this doctrine, because I still meant my books to develop along those lines at all costs and it does no harm to let one's theory act as a herald to one's practice. Some people did not agree with us. Mr. Willard Huntington Wright (Van Dine) still believes, for example, that every vestige of humanity should be ruthlessly expunged from the detective novel; but I am sure he is wrong and we are right. It is not only that the reader gets tired after a time of a literature without bowels; in the end the writer gets tired of it too, and that is fatal." (from "Gaudy Night" in The Art of the Mystery Story:209)
3. "The art of framing lies - but mark! of framing lies in the right way .... There is the crux. Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself. That the writer himself should tell a flat lie is contrary to all the canons of detective art." (from Sayers' "Aristotle on Detective Fiction" quoted in Aaron Elkins, "The Art of Framing: Dorothy L. Sayers on Mystery Fiction" in Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration:99)
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