Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life.
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
