You tell me your favorite novelists and I’ll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.

Art experts are unfailingly opposed to Art for the simple reason that they are interested in Art – but Art is not interested in Art. Art is interested in life.

Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents birth.

Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you.

The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person’s name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.

Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man’s universe is the earth?

Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with.

The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I’d call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America’s whole culture-aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn’t part of the local atmosphere.

Whenever you hear the word “inevitable”, watch out! An enemy of humanity has identified himself.

Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with