Joseph Smith Fletcher

“ Viner lighted his pipe, thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers and leaned back against the mantelpiece.
"My dear aunt!" he said half-teasingly, half-seriously. "You're worse than a drug-taker. Whatever makes a highly-respectable, shrewd old lady like you cherish such an insensate fancy for this sort of stuff?"
"Stuff?" demanded Miss Penkridge, who had resumed her knitting. "Pooh! It's not stuff—it's life! Real life—in the form of fiction!"
Viner shook his head, pityingly. He never read fiction for his own amusement; his tastes in reading lay elsewhere, in solid directions. ”

“ Judged by what some people can tell of life, the novel that's improbable hasn't yet been written!"
"Well!" remarked Viner after a pause, "I dare say you're right, Aunt Bethia. Only, you see, I haven't come across the things in life that you read about in novels."
"You may yet," replied Miss Penkridge. "But when anybody says to me of a novel that it's impossible and far-fetched and so on, I'm always inclined to remind him of the old adage. For you can take it from me, Richard, that truth is stranger than fiction, and that life's full of queer things. ”

“ I never had a novel yet, nor heard one read to me, that was half as strong as it might have been!"
"Queer thing, one never hears or sees of these things, then!" exclaimed Viner. "I never have!—and I've been on this planet thirty years."
"That sort of thing hasn't come your way, Richard," remarked Miss Penkridge sententiously. "And you don't read the popular Sunday newspapers. I do! They're full of crime of all sorts. So's the world. And as to mysteries—well, I've known of two or three in my time that were much more extraordinary than any I've ever read of in novels. ”