“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.”

“Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.”

“A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig looks you straight in the eye.”

“A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.”

“What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.”

“Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!”

“He wondered what O'Brian would have been like in a real war, one in which he actually had to fight rather than just take pictures. Then he wondered what he would have been like. Most of the men he knew asked themselves that question, as if never having fought somehow made them incomplete - left a hole in their lives where a war should have been.Was it possible that this absence of war - marvellous though it was and so forth: that went without saying - was it possible that it had actually trivialised people? Because everything was so bloody trivial now, wasn't it? This was The Trivial Age. Politics was trivial. What people worried about was trivial - mortgages and pensions and the dangers of passive smoking. Jesus! - is this what we've been reduced to, worrying about passive smoking, when our parents and our grandparents had to worry about being shot or bombed?And then he began to feel guilty, because what was he implying here? That he wanted a war? ... He was glad it was over, of course, in a way - but at least while it was on people like him had known where they stood, could point to something and say: well, we may not know what we do believe in, but we don't believe in that.”