Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock.

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.