Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

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

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.