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. - V. S. Pritchett

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.

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

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.