What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.