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.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

For a creative writer possession of the ''truth'' is less important than emotional sincerity.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.