Long Books, When Read, Are Usually Overpraised,

Tolerance Is A Very Dull Virtue. It Is Boring. Unlike Love, It Has Always Had A Bad Press. It Is Negative. It Merely Means Putting Up With People, Being Able To Stand Things.

This Element Of Surprise Or Mystery — The Detective Element As It Is Sometimes Rather Emptily Called — Is Of Great Importance In A Plot. It Occurs Through A Suspension Of The Time-sequence; A Mystery Is A Pocket In Time, And It Occurs Crudely, As In "why Did The Queen Die?" And More Subtly In Half-explained Gestures And Words, The True Meaning Of Which Only Dawns Pages Ahead. Mystery Is Essential To A Plot, And Cannot Be Appreciated Without Intelligence.

Letters Have To Pass Two Tests Before They Can Be Classed As Good: They Must Express The Personality Both Of The Writer And Of The Recipient.

I Distrust Great Men. They Produce A Desert Of Uniformity Around Them And Often A Pool Of Blood Too, And I Always Feel A Little Man's Pleasure When They Come A Cropper.

There Is Fascism, Leading Only Into The Blackness Which It Has Chosen As Its Symbol, Into Smartness And Yapping Out Of Orders, And Self-righteous Brutality, Into Social As Well As International War. It Means Change Without Hope. Our Immediate Duty - In That Tinkering Which Is The Only Useful Form Of Action In Our Leaky Old Tub - Our Immediate Duty Is To Stop It.