"To write or even speak English is..." - Quote by George Orwell

“Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so. And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.”

“Manchester is the belly and guts of the nation”

“Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.”

“You must hear the birds song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.”

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”

“Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical.”

“Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.”

“Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).”

“Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.”