...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

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

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

We possess nothing certainly except the past