A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as "robust.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.