Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.

I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.