The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity-how ill they sit on the face, say,of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.