The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

Promise is the capacity for letting people down.

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?

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.