For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.