Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.

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.

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.

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.