John Betjeman

"It was through looking at churches that I came to believe in the reason churches were built."

"The Poetry Archive entry for John Betjeman, with recordings of him reciting "A Subaltern's Love Song" and "Youth and Age on Beaulieu River"

"Saint Pancras was a fourteen-year old Christian boy who was martyred in Rome in AD 304 by the Emperor Diocletian. In England he is better known as a railway station."

"Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry...about the country, the suburbs and the seaside...then there comes love...and increasingly, the fear of death."

"The test of an abstract picture, for me, is not my first reaction to it, but how long I can stand it hanging on the wall of a room where I am living."

"I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think."

"History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side."

"Ghastly Good Taste, or a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture."