A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.