Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, "a centrifugal tendency." In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.