Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?" "So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ's authority.

The trouble is. . .that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.

I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.