It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

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 artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

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

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.