There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.

I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.