Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.

[I am not] the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Hinduism the perennial philosophy that is at the core of all religions.

It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop)

The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.