To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

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

He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.