Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

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.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

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