George Orwell

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Big Brother is watching you.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Liberal - a power worshipper without power.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

Before the war and especially before the Boer War it was summer all the year round.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives but on balance life is suffering and only the very sound or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.