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.

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.