A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.

Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.