No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.

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

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.