Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!

God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

My mother married a very good man ... and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.

Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.

Not everybody is strong enough to endure life without an anesthetic. Drink probably averts more gross crime than it causes.