I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.