I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.