“I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

“Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.”

“I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.”

“Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!”

“Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.”

“I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”

“Can you say something about nothing?”