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

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.

Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.

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

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

Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.