England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

To die hating them, that was freedom.

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

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.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.