 Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep. |
| There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse. |
| Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps. |
| Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost? |
| The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as "Soho" poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent. |
| Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses. |
| I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds. |
| In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis. |
| It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style. |
| Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat. |
| Sex is the last refuge of the miserable. |
| The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. |
| Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding. |
| Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it. |
| The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right. |
| You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. |
| For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook. |
| There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings. |
| My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. |
| It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom. |
