Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them... A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.