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

how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?

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

one sees only the struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers.

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.

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

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

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

it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique—to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind,