I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.

Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.

There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.

Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.