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

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities – and found no statues of Committees.

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.

Thanks are the highest form of thought.

At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

I may not practice what I preach but God forbid I should preach what I practice

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.

Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

The test of happiness is gratitude.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

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.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?