It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano.

The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference.

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be.

In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board.

Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.

In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.