When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.