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.

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.