He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a...
When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an i...
Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneu...
His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.
Books do furnish a room.
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
On most of the occasions when I visited the Ufford, halls and reception rooms were so utterly deserted that the interior might almost have been Uncle Giles's private residence. Had he been a rich bach...
Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who...
He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident businessman into which he had grown. His face now brought...
There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.
Feeling unable to maintain this detachment of attitude towards human- and, in especial, matrimonial- affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly c...
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vist...
But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to...
Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.