In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.