“Impertinent children ought to be given six coats of shellac and set up in public places as a warning to others.”

“I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut. "A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?”

“Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes.”

“If God meant for pictures to be sent through the air He’d have never would have given us cinema. Or the national gallery.”

“I remembered that Beethoven's symphonies had sometimes been given names... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.”

“But what he said was true enough: I had recently destroyed a perfectly good set of wire braces by straightening them to pick a lock. Father had grumbled, of course, but had made another appointment to have me netted and dragged back up to London, to that third-floor ironmonger's shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.”

“As Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera.”