The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.