Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.

Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

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.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.