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The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
Four
Egoism
Purpose
Motives
Sheer
Political
Prose
Great
Motive
Writing
Impulse
Enthusiasm
Historical
Esthetic

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A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as robust.
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Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.
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I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
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[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.
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Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
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The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.
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Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.
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Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
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Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
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Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
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Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
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Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
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... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.
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The stars are a free show it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
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Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
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All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
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Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
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It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
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