“In reality, the world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.”

“If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they.”

“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”

“It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, look out from within our reality, that is would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater that reality, or it would not be reasonable.”

“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”

“You pay God a compliment by asking great things of Him.”

“It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.”

“Hundreds of men have allowed their imagination to solve the universe, but the men who have contributed to our real understanding of natural phenomena have been those who were unstinting in their application of criticism to the product of their imaginations. It is such criticism which is the essence of the scientific use of the imagination, which is... the very life-blood of science.”

“In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other.”