“If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.”

“The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.”

“Lord Snow says that every man may be permitted his own clichés. But this is not enough. He must invent his own clichés and then persist in them until, if other people use them, their source is instantly recognizable. Thus plagiarism shall be turned into homage.”

“Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.”

“Style is not the man; it is something better. It is a dizzy, dazzling structure that he erects about himself using as building materials selected elements from his own character.”

“Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going.”

“In observing the Sabbath, man was culturally structuring his time in accordance with a holy pattern. This was part of his cultural commision, along with the task of being an architect of space by tending the Garden. Space and time were thus consecrated by man's original culture.”