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.

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

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.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

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

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

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.