The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small thing in comparison.

Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.

It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.