George Orwell's Reflections on the Motives and Purpose of Writing

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.