One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.

Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there.

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