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.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

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