The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

I don't see any sign of God in this world, in the place where we live and things we know. It can all be explained to my mind perfectly satisfactorily without God. But in the great darkness beyond this little spark of light where I live, of course there may be all kinds of things. There may be a god. So I'm really an agnostic.

If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight.

For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.