The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.