"Tradition is a guide and not a jailer."

"The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger."

"The crown of literature is poetry."

"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."

"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer."

"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."

"We have long passed the Victorian Era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby."

"It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it."

"The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned."

"Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous."

"Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth."

"It is well known that Beauty does not look with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour."

"A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing."

"The writer is more concerned to know than to judge."

"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad."

"At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely."

"In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally."

"There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action."

"Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams."

"We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others."

"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."

"We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits."

"If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?"

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."

"I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written."

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too."

"Impropriety is the soul of wit."

"If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts."

"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."

"I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."

"It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent."

"Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too."

"Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species."

"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."

"I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation."