On the Continent people have good food; in England, people have good table manners.

You English are never as thorough, never as decided, never as dead-set in your views as your cousins over the Channel. You are a people of compromises, of opportunism, of amiable and business-like settlements; you can even strike a bargain with your own conscience and live ever happy afterwards. … This is no doubt a great virtue, because it has preserved you from great follies, and it is no doubt a great vice, because it has sadly refrigerated your enthusiasm and your “feu sacré.”

The Continent is noisier, less disciplined, dirtier, more rabid, craftier, more passionate, more convivial, more amorous, hedonistic, vivacious, coarse, garrulous, unruly and somehow less perfect. Please, give me a ticket straight to the Continent.

Judging by what I read of Lady Inglis’s letter, Victorians are having—and enjoying—sex. They just don’t talk about it. How terribly Victorian of them.

Britain's relationship with the English-speaking Commonwealth was closer than that with the Continent. That is how the British people feel.

He’s found a teapot and milk and is brewing up, because that’s what the English do when they’ve just broken out of military prison one jump ahead of murderous assassins from an alien death god cult, then survived being shot at by a main battle tank.

When people have to choose between civilization and warm genitals, they choose warm genitals

This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means.

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

They are most kind-hearted and compassionate, but they think they are more so than any other nation, hence the term "good-natured," which is not found outside England. Generally speaking, English people are not servile, and are not capable of baseness to obtain notoriety. ... The Englishman in general is not made for court; he is too fond of his liberty and is too sincere and artless, and he is not a flatterer. He detests trouble and restraints to such a degree that he lives according to his own taste and ideas, and does not consider that fashion is to be followed with servility. There are some people who keep so apart from fashion that in any other country they would be considered singularly odd and perhaps something more; but in this country people are above caring what is thought of them, and do not trouble themselves about other people's opinions.

Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup — if any.

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.

Sex: In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.