“One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.”

Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

I’m scared of him,” said Piggy, “and that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he’s all right really, an’ then when you see him again; it’s like asthma an’ you can’t breathe.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

Are we savages or what?

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

Ralph… would treat the day’s decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

Which is better — to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better — to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It’s as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

I resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed, which, by custom and a perverted application of the Scriptures, had been wrested from woman.

There’s a certain standard in classical music that allows the application of the term “genius,” but you’re treading on thin ice if you start applying it to rock & rollers.

I applied to Uncyclopedia Bassists, and was accepted!!

The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.

The Word of God isn’t for one particular season. It’s for every season. But in its specific application, it’s best read from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.