If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Now individual consciousness, as typified in human beings, has great advantages and great disadvantages. Individuality means a narrowing, and narrowness can be useful. It is good for close-up work. We have invented the magnifying glass and the microscope to narrow our vision, because narrowness makes for precision. But narrowness also makes for a failure of purpose, for exhaustion of the will; for purpose depends upon a broad vision, a clear sight of one's objective.

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.