As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that — thank heaven — nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.

The spirit of irony … the whiskey of the mind.

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

I know only two words of American slang, ‘swell’ and ‘lousy’.
I think ‘swell’ is lousy, but ‘lousy’ is swell.

The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor … If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life… its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.

A lot of men who have accepted – or had imposed upon them in boyhood – the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.

I’m in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn’t have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?

Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer’s race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it’s to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.

The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference.

In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.

There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.

Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.

In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare.

I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.

A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you’re going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you’re going all out.

Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.

We plan, we toil, we suffer – in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol’s eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.

I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.

Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.

Accidents, try to change them – it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.

To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.

We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom – in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve – or could contrive – anything better.

The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.

I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part – sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn’t buy a better grumbling outfit.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.

What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!

It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board.

Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.

The real lost souls don’t wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don’t give their parents a moment’s worry.

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself – with a smile.

A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him.

Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.

Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.

To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.

What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore.

Public men, Mr Birling, have responsibilities as well as privileges.

Nearly everything possible has been done to spoil this game: the heavy financial interests;… the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the Press; … but the fact remains that it is not yet spoilt, and it has gone out and conquered the world.

Although it was over 50 years ago, I have not forgotten the moment when, after exploring the maze of Indian metaphysics, I reached its central Thought. I read that if we go deeper and deeper into the self we can arrive at last at the recognition of Atman, the essential self; and that if we go deeper into the not-self, the world that seems so solid and real, pulling aside veil after veil of illusion, we shall find Brahman, the ultimate reality; and that Atman and Brahman are identical.

The happiest types I’ve ever known ran puppet shows – turning puppets into people. It works much better than turning people into puppets.

But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.

It is no use speaking in soft, gentle tones if everyone else is shouting.

When we are older we are able to live in – and make the best of – one continuing world, but when we are young we feel sometimes that in an unknown and sinister fashion the whole cosmos has been changed, one age ended and another begun when we were not noticing what was happening.

Time must be tracked down in the inner world … It is one of the peculiarities of Time that it is intensely private and yet also widely shared.

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation
creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner
world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith.

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

I was surrounded, and often enchanted, it appeared, by nothings.

Time’s only a kind of dream, Kay. If it wasn’t, it would have to destroy everything —the whole universe— and then remake it again every tenth of a second. But Time doesn’t
destroy anything. It merely moves us on —in this life— from one peephole to the next.

We are like a knight on a quest, condemned to wander through innumerable forests, bewildered and baffled, because the magic beast he is looking for is the horse he is riding.

The way to write a book is the application of the seat of one’s pants to the seat of one’s chair.

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness—when a glorious idea comes to mind, and when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be.

But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we’re only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us – the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

Western man is schizophrenic.

If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not – and the odds are against it – go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper – write.

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart.

But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from…the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

To put failure behind you, face up to it.

We cannot get grace from gadgets.

One of the delights beyond the grasp of youth is that of Not Going. Not to have an invitation for the dance, the party, the picnic, the excursion is to be diminished. To have an invitation and then not to be able to go — oh cursed spite! Now I do not care the rottenest fig whether I receive an invitation or not. After years of illusion, I finally decided I was missing nothing by Not Going. I no longer care whether I am missing anything or not.

The greatest writers of this age… are aware of the mystery of our existence.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.

If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

To multiply your joy, count your blessings.

We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own – this is happiness.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.