A Collection of Essays

men can only be highly civilised while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoid

get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The; adjective h

empire is primarily a money-making concern.

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.

A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious.

But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. "He knows all about me," you feel; "he wrote this specially for me." It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpos

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part Of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting ag