Anthony Powell Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful.

Anthony Powell
Parents—especially step-parents—are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Anthony Powell
Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

Anthony Powell
Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

Anthony Powell
People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding.

Anthony Powell
Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

Anthony Powell
For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

Anthony Powell
One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

Anthony Powell
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

Anthony Powell
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

Anthony Powell
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

Anthony Powell
In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with the most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.

Anthony Powell
She was the sort of woman who, if she had been taken in adultery, would have caught the first stone and thrown it back.

Anthony Powell
Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed 'only two dramatic features—the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy'.

Anthony Powell
The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Anthony Powell
When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.

Anthony Powell
There is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

Anthony Powell
The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd – one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like – one writes novels about it.

Anthony Powell
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

Anthony Powell
All women are stimulated by the news that any wife has left any husband.

Anthony Powell
Parents – especially step-parents – are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fufill the promise of their early years.

Anthony Powell