His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.

On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.