I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Silence is more eloquent than words.

One of my direct subordinates, one of my guys that worked for me, he would call me up or pull me aside with some major problem, some issue that was going on. And he’d say, ‚Boss, we’ve got this, and that, and the other thing.‘ And I’d look at him and I’d say, ‚Good.‘

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

If you’re lying, you’re lying.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

I want to let you in on a little secret: I don’t always feel like I’m a success. That’s right. There are plenty of times when I feel like I’ve just totally messed up and failed to connect with the people I’m trying to communicate with.

My thing is this; if I’m sick enough to think it, then I’m sick enough to say it.

In my neighborhood, when you’ve got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him.

Writing bores me so.

I don’t write letters anymore.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

The thing about the truth is, not a lot of people can handle it.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

For I can raise no money by vile means.

Words are loaded pistols.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

He who talks more is sooner exhausted.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

I don’t mind telling a dark side.

I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

I would impress upon your minds the fact that if you want to do a man justice, you should believe what a man says himself rather than what people say he says.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

By a lie, a man… annihilates his dignity as a man.

If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.