1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.

If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

Reality is inside the skull.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.