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

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.

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.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

I don’t believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.

Real friends are very special, but you have to be careful because sometimes you have a friend and you think they are made of rock, then suddenly you realise they’re only made of sand.

I don’t care much about the money at all. Frankly, if I get the chance to kiss someone in a movie, they wouldn’t need to pay me at all.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little.

How can you take care of someone else when you can’t even take care of yourself?

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll sort of be alright.

We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.

You’re hard to please: so many friends and so few cares, and can’t make yourself content.