The Past Is The Only Dead Thing

If Montaigne Is A Man In The Prime Of Life Sitting In His Study On A Warm Morning And Putting Down The Sum Of His Experience In His Rich, Sinewy Prose, Then Pascal Is That Same Man Lying Awake In The Small Hours Of The Night When Death Seems Very Close And Every Thought Is Heightened By The Apprehension That It May Be His Last.

All Charming People Have Something To Conceal, Usually Their Total Dependence On The Appreciation Of Others.

There Are Only Three Things Which Make Life Worth Living: To Be Writing A Tolerably Good Book, To Be In A Dinner Party Of Six, And To Be Traveling South With Someone Whom Your Conscience Permits You To Love.

Were I To Deduce Any System From My Feelings On Leaving Eton, It Might Be Called The Theory Of Permanent Adolescence. It Is The Theory That The Experiences Undergone By Boys At The Great Public Schools, Their Glories And Disappointments, Are So Intense As To Dominate Their Lives And To Arrest Their Development. From These It Results That The Greater Part Of The Ruling Class Remains Adolescent, School-minded, Self-conscious, Cowardly, Sentimental, And In The Last Analysis Homosexual.

The Detective Story Itself Is In A Dilemma. It Is A Vein Which Is In Danger Of Being Worked Out, The Demand Is Constant, The Powers Of Supply Variable, And The Reader, With Each One He Absorbs, Grows A Little More Sophisticated And Harder To Please, While The Novelist, After Each One He Writes, Becomes A Little More Exhausted.