"And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it. If that veck had stayed I might even have like presented the other cheek."

"Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness."

"Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive."

"The modern State, whether in a totalitarian or a democratic country, has far too much power, and we are probably right to fear it."

"The heresy of an age of reason. I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong."

"We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will."

"Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now."

"I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias."

"Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter."

"Feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up."

"My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches I had done, yes perhaps even killing some poor starry forella surrounded with mewing kots and koshkas, and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world..."

"I didn't think I experimented."

"What's all this about sin, eh?''That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.' And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.'Music,' said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. 'So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?''It can't be helped,' said Dr. Branom. 'Each man kills the thing he loves..."

"You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right."

"The downtrodden who are the great creators of slang hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression."

"Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone."

"You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care."

"And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer."

"Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy."

"He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child."

"Dreams go by opposites I was once told."

"To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art."

"The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured."

"They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had."

"To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create."

"Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination."

"Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets."

"I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has."

"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen."

"Oh? And what's so stinking about it?."

"Every dogma has its day."

"There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it."

"I like nothing better in this world than a good clean book, brother."

"Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language."

"The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours."

"The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress."

"People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know."

"The downtrodden are the great creators of slang."

"And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good."

"You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good."

"The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon."

"One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going."

"Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance."

"You have no cause to grumble boy. You made your choice and all this is a consequence of your choice. Whatever now ensues is what you yourself have chosen."

"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

"Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room."

"When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man."

"I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless."