There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.

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

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.