From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

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

This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

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

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

Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.