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.
By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.
The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.
It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant have so much influence.
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.