It is only the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think.

The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.

I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!