The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land.

There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters.

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.

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

I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.