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

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

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

I think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.

Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?

The real Da’wah to Islam is the character of a Muslim.

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

People are interested by talent. God is impressed by character

Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you cannot understand at the time.

Remember that your character is the sum total of your habits.

I told you I was trouble, you know that I’m no good.

Character is power.

Difficulty attracts the characterful man, for it is by grasping it that he fulfils himself.