A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.
This was not Aunt Dahlia, my good and kindly aunt, but my Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.
Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know?
It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.
It is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts hamming it up.
Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.
Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant – better left unstirred.
I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.
Flowers are happy things.
He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
There’s too much of that where-every-prospect-pleases-and-only-man-is-vile stuff buzzing around for my taste.
Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.
I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover-the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.
I was in rare fettle and the heart had touched a new high. I don’t know anything that braces one up like finding you haven’t got to get married after all.
It ought to be a criminal offence for women to dye their hair. Especially red. What the devil do women do that sort of thing for?