The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

the mute protest in your own bones

Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

Writing a novel is agony.