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

Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.

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.

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them

Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.

The audiences certainly have declined. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.

The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.