We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means ... the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the 'human animal', and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen.

Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work.

Work was like cats were supposed to be: if you disliked and feared it and tried to keep out if its way, it knew at once and sought you out and jumped on your lap and climbed all over you to show how much it loved you. Please God, he thought, don't let me die in harness.

Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.