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

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.

The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

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.

The things that we decide to run from are the truth. When you make excuses, you’re running from the truth.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

We’re not a racist organization, because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism, and we know that racism is just – it’s a byproduct of capitalism.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.

Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.

Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.

The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument.

99% of failures come from people who make excuses.