The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.

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.

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

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.