Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
You can’t ever tell what’s going to hurt people.
He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.
If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it’s so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.
I put the words down and push them a bit.
The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
Winston Churchill is always expecting rabbits to come out of an empty hat.
An artist must be a reactionary.
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.
I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.