I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain. - Alan Bennett

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.

The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.