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

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.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

The secret of a successful restaurant is sharp knives.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.