Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

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.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.