The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.
A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist – after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.
Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?
Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.
Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.
When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.
If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.
Manchester is the belly and guts of the nation.