We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

Do you remember Italy?

Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.