When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.