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.

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

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

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.

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

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