Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.