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.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

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.

[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.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

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