The aged are terrible - mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.