But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

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.

'I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles.' 'No, I'm afraid not.' 'D'you want to change?' 'It's the only evidence of life.'

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

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

O God, make me good, but not yet.