The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.

It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.