Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.