All the teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and optatives.

The greedy man is he who habitually eats too much, knowing that he is injuring his bodily health thereby, and this is a vice to which not the gourmet but the gourmand is a slave.

Taste is one of the five senses, and the man who tells us with priggish pride that he does not care what he eats is merely boasting of his sad deficiency: he might as well be proud of being deaf or blind, or, owing to a perpetual cold in the head, of being devoid of the sense of smell.

Early impressions are like glimpses seen through the window by night when lightning is about.

I can't fathom writers married to writers and musicians married to musicians. There's your enemy in bed beside you.

I'm not very kind about marriage. I will never get married again.

My two elder sisters married Englishmen and went abroad.

Recently, I dreamed that I returned home to find my wife had married Ray Winstone. They were kind and let me stay, but the whole thing was awkward.