Great Throughts Treasury

"Sex is the last refuge of the miserable ."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained."

"The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face."

"The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency."

"The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children."

"The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn"

"The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did."

"The search for a life-style involves a journey to the interior. This is not altogether a pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but you also have to take a long look at what your friends call the trouble with you. Nevertheless, the journey is worth making."

"The war between the sexes is the only one in which both sides regularly sleep with the enemy."

"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."

"There are girls who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love "

"Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses."

"To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."

"To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw "

"Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster."

"To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."

"Whatever has gone on in the outer world has passed me by. But I think if anyone said to me, 'if you go on like this life will pass you by,' I would reply, 'thank God for that, I nearly got mixed up in the beastly thing."

"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?""

"Vice is its own reward."

"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."

"Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making."

"You fall out of your mother"

"My function in life was to render clear what was already blindly conspicuous."