The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.

Poverty is what I'm writing about.

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginning…

One cannot really be Catholic & grown-up.

'It's a wery remarkable circumstance, sir', said Sam, 'that poverty and oysters seems to go together.'

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, And you think your so clever, and classless and free, But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.