"A love affair is a grafting operation. "What has once been joined never forgets". There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible … - Cyril Connolly

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Baudelaire; it is to them, and not to their English contemporaries, that we owe our conception of modern life. The artist whose reward is perfection and where perfection can be obtained only by a separation of standards from those of the non-artist is led to adopt one of four rôles: the High Priest (Mallarmé, Joyce, Yeats), the Dandy (Firbank, Beerbohm, Moore), the Incorruptible Observer (Maugham, Maupassant) or the Detached Philosopher (Strachey, Anatole France). What he will not be is a Fighter or Helper.