At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

One of the most difficult things for a man to do is to realise that he does not stand at the centre of things, but at the circumference.

....But I am always suspicious of a novelist's theories; I have never known them to be anything other than a justification of his own shortcomings. So a writer who has no gift for the contrivance of a plausible story will tell you that story-telling is the least important part of the novelist's equipment, and if he is devoid of humour he will moan that humour is the death of fiction.

Modern Poets. I should be content with less cleverness if only they had more feeling. They make little songs not from great sorrows but from the sober pleasures of a good education.

The novelist is dead in the man who has become aware of the triviality of human affairs.