We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.

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.

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

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

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.

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.