"Why, Sir, when I have anything to invent, I never trouble my head about it, as other men do; but presently turn over this Book, and there I have, at one view, all that Perseus, Montaigne, Seneca's Tragedies, Horace, Juvenal, Claudian, Pliny, Plutarch's lives, and the rest, have ever thought upon this subject: and so, in a trice, by leaving out a few words, or putting in others of my own, the business is done."

"Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia."

"I turn over a new leaf every day," I said. "But the blots show through."

"[There's] too many people making too much muck and too much noise with too little space to do it in."

"Now, […] the world is beginning to look like what it is—overcrowded, dirty, noisy, smelly, and rapidly running out of resources. We're nearing the end of the rainbow, with not a crock of gold in sight."

"Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?"

"Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?""

"The 50s face was angry, the 60s face was well-fed, the 70s face was foxy. Perhaps it was the right expression: there was a lot to be wary about."

"I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg."

"As children, she and Shirley had hated Christmas, for it had marked them out for the lepers that they were: outcasts, treeless, without kin, without comfort, without presents, without past. She preferred the densely populated world she had created, with all its problems."

"‘In my business,’ she said, ‘I don’t think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. Dies into full knowledge.’"

"Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place."

"England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons."

"The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom."

"Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember."

"The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out."

"Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it."

"Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace."

"How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever."

"Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations."

"On we read, confusing the characters with the incidents and neglecting the outcome, but tickled by the images and the turns of the talk. It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers!"

"He had something of the air, if one can imagine such a combination, of a witty and decadent Red Indian."

"I remember the average curate at home as something between a eunuch and a snigger."

"Princess: I am always disappointed with mountains. There are no mountains in the world as high as I could wish. Adrian: No? Princess: They irritate me invariably. I should like to shake Switzerland."

"Oh! help me, heaven," she prayed, "to be decorative and to do right!"

"It is the peculiar temper of Firbank's humour which divides him from the nineties. His raw material, allowing for the inevitable changes of fashion, is almost identical with Oscar Wilde's – the lives of rich, slightly decadent people seen against a background of traditional culture, grand opera, the picture galleries and the Court; but Wilde's was at heart radically sentimental. His wit is ornamental; Firbank's is structural. Wilde is rococo; Firbank is baroque."

"There was a pause – just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly."

"The world is so disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain."

"I suppose when there's no more room for another crow's-foot, one attains a sort of peace?"

"I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence."

"As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street."

"Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad."

"Art is the expression of the conviction that we can have a rational relationship with the world and each other. It isn't the faith or hope that we can, it is the demonstration that we can."

"At fifteen years of age, when first my parents settled down in London (temporarily as they thought) I had never been in England, never had an English friend or English governess, or English tuition of any sort or kind. I did not speak one word of English. Then how did it all come about? Neo-Victorians and Neo-Georgians will put it down to destiny; others to predestination. I, in my humble way, put it down to the Will of God. And looking back on my long life and its many changes I can trace the links of my chain of life that began on the great plains of Hungary, continued through the heart of London, and find me now at this hour of writing this book in Monte Carlo jotting down all that I can remember of those links which led me one by one to the conception of my first literary work. If any one of those links had not been, if any turn of event in my life had been different, I would probably have ended my days in the country of my birth and known nothing of the happiness which comes from love, from the affection of friends (such as one meets in England) and from success in the work to which I devoted so many years of my life."

"I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny." And nothing can be quite so wonderful as the workings of a man's or a woman's destiny."

"Well, I flung the window open an' I shouted, "Yes, that's right Millandra – I'm goin' to Greece for the sex; sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea, an’ sex for supper." Well, she just ignored me but this little cab driver leans out an' pipes up, "That sounds like a marvellous diet, love." "It is," I shouted back, "have y' never heard of it? It's called the 'F' Plan.""

"Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting."

"This pen's all I have of ."

"I'm not sayin' she's a bragger, but if you've been to Paradise, she's got a season ticket."

"She divorced her husband, y' know. I never knew him, it was before I met Jane. Apparently she came back from work one mornin' an' found her husband in bed with the milkman. With the milkman, honest to God. Well, apparently, from that day forward Jane was a feminist. An' I've noticed, she never takes milk in her tea."

"Marriage is like the Middle East, isn't it? There's no solution."

"The ones we choose to love become our anchor when the hawser of the blood-tie's hacked, or frays."

"I have to confess that I felt rather proud of the simple device of my suffocating cloud. The Prospero of poisons, the Faustus of the front, bringing mental magic to modern armament."

"Frank: There, you see, an example of assonance. Rita: Oh, it means getting' the rhyme wrong."

"Rita: Will they sack you. Frank: [lying flat on the floor] The sack? God no; that would involve making a decision. Pissed is all right. To get the sack, it'd have to be rape on a grand scale; and not just with students either. [Rita gets up and moves across to look at him] That would only amount to a slight misdemeanour. For dismissal it'd have to be nothing less than buggering the bursar."

"Rita: Have they sacked y'? Frank: Not quite. Rita: Well, why y' – packing your books away. Frank: Australia. [After a pause] Some weeks ago – made rather a night of it. Rita: Did y' bugger the bursar? Frank: Metaphorically."

"That same manne, that renneth awaye, Maye again fight, an other daye."

"For Myrth prolongeth lyfe, and causeth health."

"I am sorie God made me so comely."