Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.