“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.”

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant.

The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses.

A thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood.

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people’s lives, the lives of people you don’t know, and you want to know what’s going to happen to them.

I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

I was raised to believe that religion is a beautiful thing, but it’s fiction.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.