Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.

Western man is schizophrenic.

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.