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

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes.

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.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

[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.