“A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

Don’t hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

For in that city -New York; there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

To understand all is to forgive all.

I love what I’ve done and I just can’t stand to see what they’re doing to it. But I’ve learned to live with it because that’s what they’ve done. They’ve come in with the modern sounds. I call it modern pop. It’s not country anymore.

Large motorway flyovers are the cathedrals of the modern world.

In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization.

I have every confidence in the ultimate success of our joint cause; but success in modern war requires something more than courage and a willingness to die: it requires careful preparation.

Even they are competing with the same type of problem that I’m competing with.