I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

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 difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.