Thanks are the highest form of thought.

Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.

God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.

Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.

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

I don't need a church to tell me I'm wrong where I already know I'm wrong; I need a Church to tell me I'm wrong where I think I'm right

The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

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.

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

Gardening is an exercise in optimism.

They pick a president and then for four years they pick on him.

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.

The interior life is often stupid.

A good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one which enables him to sustain a failure.

Sweet the young muse with love intense, Which smiles o'er sleeping innocence.

People are hypocrites. If you ask them what they want to see on TV, they'll tell you they want better quality programming. And then what do they watch? 'Gilligan's Island.'

The reason why I don't have a hero is because heroes set a bar - whereas if we don't have one, our potential is unlimited.

I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.