From an interview with Anthony Lane, writer for The New Yorker: “The truth is, that if you’re working on a piece at three in the morning, you’re not Keats; you’re just late.”

Orwell, timeless and telling. From his essay Charles Dickens: “It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilized but not primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dicken’s books is that, as nineteenth-century novelists go, he is rather ignorant. He knows very little about the way things really happen.”

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writing in The Independent: “Since New Labour came to power – a period of extraordinary inflow, because of extraordinary economic prosperity -1.8m Britons have chosen to emigrate. I don’t think the government can be blamed for this phenomenon. It is the reality of globalisation. But whereas white Britons moving elsewhere are considered boldly enterprising and imaginative, Indians and Poles (the largest groups currently migrating legally into Britain) are described as invidious job bandits and multicultural hooligans.”

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn: “Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive almost anything short of total global catastrophe.”

Orwell discussing Ghandi’s autobiography from his essay Reflections on Ghandi: “In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachement” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that an ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”