Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

• It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.
• A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
• Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
• I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
• Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
• The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
• Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
• From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
• My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
• I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.