Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

[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.

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.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.

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.