The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.