Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

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

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.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .

Good writing is like a windowpane.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.