Keep your talent in the dark and you'll never be insulted.

[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.

the wealthy ... live in marble mausoleums surrounded by the suspicions and neuroses that have replaced the medieval moats which once isolated so-called aristocrats from reality.

Cocktails are society's most enduring invention!

Good manners spring from just one thing - kind impulses.

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

Intolerance of mediocrity has been the main prop of my independence.