We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Sheep with a nasty side.

Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

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

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.