I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.

that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

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

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

All fates are ‘worse than death’.