His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.
Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me.
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.
I’ve always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.
Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.
My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
I haven’t been to sleep for over a year. That’s why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn’t sleep.
Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.
Yes, cider and tinned salmon are the staple diet of the agricultural classes.
Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.
From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.
At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German – overdone.
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.