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I'd always been a great fan of George Orwell. -- Bill Vaughan
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me. -- Robert Harris
I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell. -- Aravind Adiga
If journalism were a religious order, George Orwell would be its patron saint. -- Janadas Devan
Orwell couldn't see that Big Brother would not be The State, but The Corporation. -- Laurence Overmire
George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing. -- Atul Gawande
Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days. -- John Pilger
He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry. -- Cyril Connolly
The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes. -- Helmut Newton
Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events! -- W. H. Auden
Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments. -- Sarah Hall
As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it. -- Max Hastings
George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus. -- Arthur Levitt Jr
Whoa!" he says with a smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. "Chicken salad a la George Orwell! -- Haruki Murakami
Yeah, but I forgot to take my George Orwell-shaped multivitamins along with my breakfast bowl of Big Brother Os this morning. -- Jim Butcher
The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley; -- David Mitchell
[George] Orwell's essays. It's got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true. -- Anthony Bourdain
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Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations. -- Vijay Seshadri
George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech. -- Christopher Lasch
Orwell was the sort of man who was full of grievances. He was very loyal. Once he got to know you, he was extremely loyal. He hated passionately and irrationally. -- George Woodcock
George Orwell said, "Whoever controls the past controls the future," by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people. -- Howard Zinn
I read all the time so it's difficult to say who my all-time favourites are. One is George Orwell, because he makes political writing so simple a child could understand it. -- Melvin Burgess
The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe -- because no one else could be such a fool. -- Thomas Sowell
Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics. -- Christopher Hitchens
Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers. -- Tad Williams
Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice. -- Padgett Powell
It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state. -- Heather Brooke
Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating. -- J. G. Ballard
Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming. -- Larry Wall
George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'. -- Gideon Haigh
I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: Anthem, by Ayn Rand; 1984, by George Orwell; or Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. -- Sara Shepard
I think [George] Orwell is right. There are certainly moments when political differences appear minor, and someone can claim to be non-political or to want to stay out of the fray, but today is not one of those moments. -- Adam Hochschild
You know, like, none of us would choose - no matter where we are in the world - would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question. -- Sheena Iyengar
People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve. -- Christopher Hitchens
I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote. -- Jill Lepore
George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody. -- Haruki Murakami
Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed. -- Philip Roth
I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It's amazing how we go to school when we're so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don't have to memorize anything. -- Benjamin Clementine
What is it that unites, on the left of British politics, George Orwell, Billy Bragg, Gordon Brown and myself? An understanding that identity and a sense of belonging need to be linked to our commitment to nationhood and a modern form of patriotism. -- David Blunkett
The term Big Brother is from George Orwell's book 1984 - where everyone's watched over by a network of cameras called Big Brother. I've never understood why Orwell chose that phrase for somebody watching you all the time. Isn't that more like Creepy Uncle? -- Craig Ferguson
I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley. -- Sara Shepard
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home. -- Gary Kemp
Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call 'cultural studies. -- Christopher Hitchens
The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship. -- George Packer
For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell's '1984.' Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: 'Animal Farm.' -- Jonathan Turley
George Orwell's '1984' frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it's not a celebration of poetic language. It's decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what '1984' shows is that language can be a dirty trick. -- Graham Joyce
Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us. -- Ramez Naam
Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days. When you have someone like Cheney who talks about "endless war" or war that might last fifty years, he could be Big Brother. You have Bush incessantly going on about the evil ones. -- John Pilger
For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined. -- James Gleick
Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve. -- Christopher Hitchens
Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock. -- Frans de Waal
Think about George Orwell's three-minute hate from the novel '1984' and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable. -- Chuck Palahniuk
It wasn't until my teenage years that a book really left a mark, and that was George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' It was on the syllabus at school when I was about 16, and I went on to read more of his books. It was the height of the Cold War, so a lot of the messages really resonated at the time. -- John Niven
I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too. -- Chris Abani

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