“Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.”

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in ‘Old Maid’; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

Trust is good, but control is better.

Criticism does not make you smarter or better than the one you are criticizing. In fact, the stuff you are critical of in others is the same stuff you don’t like about yourself.

There’s no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.

They say it is better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable, but how about a compromise like moderately rich and just moody?

The greatest thing about tomorrow is, I will be better than I am today…There is no such thing as a setback. The lessons I learn today I will apply tomorrow, and I will be better.

I don’t hire anybody not brighter than I am. If they’re not brighter than I am, I don’t need them.

The person with just one good idea is a thousand times better off than the person with no good ideas.