For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.