Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.