“The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.”

Religion I have defined as “Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art”.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a ‘country run by Jews,’

Literature is news that stays news.

The temple is holy because it is not for sale.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron, I should have been able to do better.

Technique is the test of sincerity.

Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.

Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Every great change is simple.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.

Wars are made to make debt.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web… Now even my cat has its own page.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

Too many head-turners; not enough page-turners.

There’s so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.

Will you try being a minimalist? Reduce the clutter, the daily list? A clean blank page, room for something new. Darkness to Light, half a life you could have missed.