All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

Language is memory and metaphor.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

As often as not our whole self...engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.