G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English journalist, novelist, essayist and poet, born 29 May 1874 and died 14 June 1936. He is best remembered for the Father Brown detective stories and for books like Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday, but he made his living as a working columnist — a weekly column in The Illustrated London News from 1905 that he kept up for some three decades. That enormous, largely uncollected output is why so many of his best sentences circulate as orphan epigrams, and why they so often end up filed under a wittier-sounding name.