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.

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

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

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.