I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.

I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success