I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear o...
I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of th...
If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...
I was thinking about honour. It's a thing that changes doesn't it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we'd laugh. There must have been a time when it w...
Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.''I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips dri...
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.
He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible.
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.
Of course those that have charm don't really need brains.
Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratts Club. 'Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,' he said. 'Let's at leas...
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at t...
If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emo...