Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

I felt the beginning of a passion, hopeless in the long run, but very nourishing, for identifying myself with people who were not my own, and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.