“The false logic involved is: “We exist; therefore something—call it X—created us.””

— Arthur C. Clarke, book Crusade

Once this assumption is made, the properties of the hypothetical X can be fantasied in an unlimited number of ways.
But the entire process is obviously fallacious; for by the same logic something must have created X—and so on. We are immediately involved in an infinite regress, which can have no meaning in the real universe.

Crusade, p. 878
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)

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Arthur C. Clarke207

British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u… 1917–2008

Robert James Waller (1939–2017) American writer

“By believing passionately in something that does not yet exist, we create it.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

“All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence… logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

'Vagueness' http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/vagueness.htm, first published in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1 June, 1923 <br class="br">1920s

“This is why we call people exes, I guess -- because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. It's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. It's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. The X is a diagram of two paths.”

John Green book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Will Grayson, p. 277
Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010)

“Determinism, in the strict sense, is self-contradictory. For if man’s mental processes—specifically, his attempts at reasoning—are not free, if they are determined by environment and heredity, then there is no means of claiming that theory x is true and y is false—since man can have no way of knowing that his mental processes might not be conditioned to force him to believe that x is logical, when in fact it is not.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

Source: “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism,” 1969, p. 23

“By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Attributed to Kafka in Ambiguous Spaces (2008) by NaJa & deOstos (Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos), p. 7, and a couple other publications since, this is actually from Report to Greco (1965) by Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 434
Misattributed

“Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15
1940s
Context: Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.