Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

[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.

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

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.