Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.