The fight against bad English is not frivolous.

If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.