All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

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

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.