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.

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.

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

It's all in the art. You get no credit for living.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

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

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.