To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water, And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.

There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.