[Armenians] seem to me the only genuine 'men of the world.' I suppose everyone at times likes to picture himself as such a person, Sometimes, when I find that elusive ideal looming too attractively, when I envy among my friends this one's adaptability to diverse company, this one's cosmopolitan experience, this one's impenetrable armour against sentimentality and humbug, that one's freedom from conventional prejudices, this one's astute ordering of his finances and nicely calculated hospitality, and realize that, whatever happens to me and however I deplore it, I shall never in actual fact become a 'hardboiled man of the world' of the kind I read about in the novels I sometimes obtain at book-stalls for short railway journeys; that I shall always be ill at ease with nine out of every ten people I meet; that I shall always find something startling and rather abhorrent in the things most other people think worth doing, and something puzzling in their standards of importance; that I shall probably be increasingly, rather than decreasingly, vulnerable to the inevitable minor disasters and injustices of life - then I comfort myself a little by thinking that, perhaps, if I were an Armenian I should find things easier.
- Evelyn Waugh, Remote People, pp.267-268 in Waugh Abroad
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