It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

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

Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

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

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

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language