"The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently" (9th May 1997)

"The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write." "'You want strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of interest, a single vivid impression left upon the mind. Poe is the master of all.'" 

"The detective stories were 'admirable...so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point'". 

"When Doyle was enthusiastic about a subject it did not have to make sense, and he did not bother to follow it through and weld a story into a logically coherent whole. In a sense, he is the precursor of the children's serials of the 1930s cinema, in which each episode ends on a question mark. How the problem is resolved is of no consequence, provided that it is; he was a victim of the serial-writing habit in which impetus is all."

Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook