If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

Writing a novel is agony.