In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.