Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.