“I was very pink and young and English; and quite prepared for a Continent complete with poisonous drains, roast frogs, bedbugs and vice.”

“There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.”

“I always say that I only wish to have three sorts of people as my friends, those who are very rich, those who are very witty, and those who are very beautiful.”

“... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.”

“Christ, it is sad, sad to see on quite a few of these faces - young ones particularly - a glum, defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can't enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporation executives. But isn't it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters alive? Isn't it some tiny satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn't it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn't hopelessly corrupt?”

“And again and again I have to remind myself the whole art of life is to lean on people, to involve oneself with them quite fearlessly and yet — when the props are kicked away — remain leaning, as it were, on empty air. Like levitation.”

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”