All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.

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

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

Like all bad drivers, he [Henry Andrews] thought he was the best driver in the world...

Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.

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.

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.