To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpan….

Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic orga….

Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elemen….

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along..

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have ….

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book..

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them....

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well..

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowled….

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all..

The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's..

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding pres….

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being..

The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar..

O God, make me good, but not yet..

No one is ever holy without suffering..

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die..

... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom..

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for on….

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth..