Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

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.

[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.

The Canadian spirit is cautious, observant and critical where the American is assertive.

It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.