"Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has his own, almost romantic sense of propriety."

"Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game."

"There is more magic in sin if it is not committed."

"On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away."

"One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential."

"To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal."

"Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough."

"Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time."

"The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets and hangings from the draper, the information takes on something from the theme of the novel itself: the material is a symbol of the exotic, and the exotic feeds the Romantic appetite. It will lead to satiety, bankruptcy and eventually to nihilism and the final drive towards death and nothingness."

"Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America."

"The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature."

"In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldn't last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young."

"How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit."

"Mass society destroys the things it is told are its inheritance. It is rarely possible to see the Abbey without being surrounded by thousands of tourists from all over the world. Like St. Peter's at Rome, it has been turned into a sinister sort of railway terminal. The aisles are as crowded as the pavements of Oxford Street or the alleys of a large shop, imagination is jostled, awe dispersed, and the mind never at rest. All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people."

"The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it."

"I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it. It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves."

"Yes, well I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now I'm just stuck, I'm afraid."

"It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me."

"Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience."

"A rasp and flare as [Danny] struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved for light."

"The fired burnt furiously, piled high with logs. Danny had dragged the log basket onto the hearth rug and was kneeling beside it, a log in each hand, watching the fire burn."

"[Tom] was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened."

"But sir, certainly, there isn't any proof as to my guilt..."

"They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats."

"Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?"

"You wring a chicken's neck, you don't expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you?"

"[Danny] was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter."

"It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience."

"[Tom] was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank."

"Do you think confession's the only route to redemption?"

"When we got married, you didn't even want kids. It was... you and me."

"[Tom had] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart."

"[Tom] denies [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life."

"But [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments."

"I don't know why I killed her, I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I don't know how to live with it."

"I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we've ever had through the school."

"...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left."

"Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained."

"The forensic evidence for Danny's guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar."

"The man needs to learn how to controll his anger, he is crossing a border here, and he has no right"

"[Lauren's] eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue."

"...he'd seen the boy's [Danny's] body hang suspended... an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air."

"The boy [Danny] looked like a baby: purple faced, wet hair, that drowned look of a newborn, cast up on to its mother's suddenly creased and spongy belly."

"A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice."

"My suffering left me sad and gloomy."

"Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar—the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved. In his entirely personal experience of [languages], English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was music from the streets. Which is to say, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish."

"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality."

"I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater."

"Don't you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"

"If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?"