War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.

A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.

...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.