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.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

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

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

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.