Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O’Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O’Brien: You do not exist.

Baumauer wants a life in which he cannot be belittled, judged or controlled by worse men.

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread...

Secrets are dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.

Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to dootherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, todo what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

Shame comes in different doses.

Kalist likes to listen to the collective voices swell as more individuals in his colony arrive.

Obelmäker always suspected Kalist of being a driven man with a determined selfishness that verged on sociopathic, but he actually appears to be suffering for once, in a humane way, like one who has been...

What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our...

Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

Don’t mock my suggestions, Ridley – one day in the near future, they might just save your life.” Maxwell D. Kalist.

die Schwachen ein,” – the vulnerable one – after he cried like a child when he sliced two, thin strips of skin off his own index finger using a cheese grater (accidentally) one night when...

Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people – and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?

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...

His manhood sways briefly, then comes to a standstill.

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

Stop flirting,” he tells her, but he looks at her breasts and thinks, The girls with the bruises in the sex films are just dead dolls, but this pretty toy is alive.

Obelmäker is a deeply fearful person and terribly indecisive. Even when he makes a choice, it’s usually bad.

And don’t drop food.

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.’White to play and mate in two moves.’Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother....

Baumauer secretly fears Kalist – and Kalist knows it.

Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.

He’s in a side room alone with her and it’s far too fucking hot.

An overnight bag with the company logo – a white silhouette of a finch (which once perched on the curved back of a stallion representing cofounder, Orwell, but has now been ‘adjusted’) – sits motionless...

Baumauer has been lured into the exhausting habit of supplying Kalist with ever more exceptional quality work just to appease him and often survives all day and all evening without food, but Maxwell D. Kalist...

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too...

Don’t suffocate in there.

power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the...

You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.

You’re a fat cunt and you can’t add up to save your life.” Dimitri Pissec.

Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a...

You need a father figure in your life.

The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell’s 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the...

If there’s grass on the pitch,” and gives his small cock a quick squeeze under the desk.

Opposite Pissec sits ghoulish Gottfried Baumauer, a tall, skinny workaholic with dark-ringed eye sockets and long, yellowing smoker’s fingers. He’s thirty-eight. He doesn’t say much. He drinks a lot of tea – likes it strong...

I hate working with sexy women.” Dimitri Pissec.

Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The...

You’ve never really loved your wife, have you, Ridley?

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had...

Pissec approaches Pamela Geiger’s cubicle, itching in rhythm with her. He wants to ask her a question while Kalist is out of earshot. She’s not a grass, he’s sure, but stupid people die first.

Baumauer sits at home in silence in the evenings planning how to impress his rigidly strict father who’s in his late seventies, but who still enforces the same dynamic between himself and his three, guilt-ridden...

A black-haired bitch with man’s hands, widow Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch makes all the important decisions. She is a power-hungry dominatrix. Orwell is her slave. (No one ever sees him.)

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one...

The answer to 1984 is 1776

Only men with intelligence, confidence and absolutely no empathy at all can progress upstairs.

The beagles are partying under Geiger’s desk.

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had ‘given’ their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had...

Do I need to fire the little prat yet?” Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch.