Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

The English Bible - a book which if everything else in our language should perish would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I never felt totally 100% patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon and Damascus and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English but with not one recognizable syllable.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.