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.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.

An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.