Father eternal, ruler of creation, Spirit of life, which moved ere form was made Through the thick darkness covering every nation Light to man's blindness, O be Thou our aid.

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

I shall not die young, for I am already near seventy: I may die old.

I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily.

If fathers were to be mothers, then there will never have a family of more than three.

If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.