I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is a cheap moral swagger. In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone along with the rest of revealed religion, it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument.

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.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.