A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.
Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.
Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
The lights must never go out, The music must always play.
The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they’ve realised they can’t get away with it.
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
Poetry is the only art people haven’t learned to consume like soup.
But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer “writer” for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer “poetry” would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who’s untrue to his wife.
We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn’t know who he is and the latter does.
The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place;.
Words have no word for words that are not true.