A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

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

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

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

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

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