Reverence is fatal to literature.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.