It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.