“Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.”

I don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.

He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Vice is its own reward.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

A star appeared…and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.

I don’t like tokenism. I don’t like the idea that somebody should just appear at a press conference or in a media interview because they are a woman.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

The sunlit face of the earth would appear to shine by the light diffused back into space from the land and water-covered areas.