“The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.”

“I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth.”

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

“You think—I dare say that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it We’re destroying words—scores of them hundreds of them every day. It’s a beautiful thing the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms there are also the antonyms.”

“When I was young and had no senseIn far-off MandalayI lost my heart to a Burmese girlAs lovely as the day.Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,her teeth were ivory;I said, "For twenty silver pieces,Maiden, sleep with me."She looked at me, so pure, so sad,The loveliest thing alive,And in her lisping, virgin voice,Stood out for twenty-five.”

“I said. ‘It seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment.’‘No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in HERE‘‘—he tapped his forehead—‘and you’re all right.”

“They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. ‘The artery's gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting—I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale comer of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me—wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.”