Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.