God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.

How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed.

Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.