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There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

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
Opinion
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Merit
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The more intelligent, the less sane
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The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
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He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
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There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.
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It's a wonderful feeling to have a niece like you Because you are always so dear You are so dear no matter the year But all throughout each day of the year There could hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.
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You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
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By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
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It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
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All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
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Take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another.
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Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
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