All people who work with their hands are party invisible, and the more important the work they do, the more invisible they are.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers... the red buses, the blue policemen -- all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

If I did compress what I know and think about the spanish civil war into 6 lines you wouldn't print it. You wouldn't have the guts.

I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.

Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.

Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends that the loss of its abdomen does not matter

The Victorian happy ending– a vision of a huge loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters.

But every writer, especially every novelist, has a 'message,' whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.

...however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back".