The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.

Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.