...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.