When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

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.

[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.