Colin Dexter

‘He's promised to see a psychiatrist — but I'm not very optimistic about that. I only ever knew one psychiatrist. Funny chap. If ever a man was in need of psychiatric treatment it was him.’

...he'd come round to the view that Freud would have been a far more valuable citizen if he'd stuck to his research on local anaesthetics.

He hated suicides. ... Was suicide just the coward's refuge from some black despair? Or was it in its way an act of courage that revealed a perverted sort of valour? Not that, though. So many other lives were intertwined: no burdens were shed — they were merely passed from the shoulders of one to those of another.