Jan Morris Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

Like most writers, I think far too much about myself anyway, and in my heart of hearts don't think I am worth talking about in this way.

Jan Morris
The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

Jan Morris
Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Jan Morris
I began to see that my imperial cockiness was nonsense and that the empire, in its last years at least, wasn't a bit arrogant, it wasn't a bit cocky.

Jan Morris
The personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

Jan Morris
As to sex, the original pleasure, I cannot recommend too highly the advantages of androgyny.

Jan Morris
A sex change is a very extraordinary thing for someone to have gone through and particularly extraordinary for a writer, I think. But although... the effects of it appear kind of subliminally through everything I've written, I don't believe I've created a work of art around it.

Jan Morris
I was three or four when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.

Jan Morris
Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design?

Jan Morris
Vermonters, it seems to me, are like ethnics in their own land. They are exceedingly conscious of their difference from other Americans, and they talk a great deal about outsiders, newcomers, and people from the south.

Jan Morris
Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world.

Jan Morris
I was born with the wrong body, being feminine by gender but male by sex, and I could achieve completeness only when the one was adjusted to the other.

Jan Morris
The British came out of the Second World War an extremely tired and disillusioned nation, exemplified by the fact that they immediately gave the boot to their great hero, Winston Churchill. All they were interested in then was getting back to their island and trying to make it a more decent place to live. In that respect, the will to empire had most certainly gone.

Jan Morris
Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Jan Morris
The city bursts with ideas as with traffic, a swirl of newness and surprise. Who can be bored in a city? If you are tired of one activity you can try something else, change your job, take your custom to another restaurant.

Jan Morris
Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

Jan Morris
The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Jan Morris
To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

Jan Morris
I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.

Jan Morris
Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.

Jan Morris
To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.... It is the essentialness of oneself.

Jan Morris
If there is one place in the United States where private styles make up for public images, it is San Francisco, where all lapsed lovers of America, even loyalists like me experiencing spasms of disillusionment, should be taken for refresher courses. The tides of all-American conformity beat vainly against the San Franciscan rock.

Jan Morris
I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual. I believe in its imaginative qualities and its potential as art and literature.

Jan Morris
Australia is a country not so much of fulfillment as of theatrical expectation.

Jan Morris
Vermonters are not only charmless of manner, on the whole; they are also, as far as I can judge, utterly without pretence, and give the salutary impression that they don't care ten cents whether you are amused, affronted, intrigued, or bored stiff by them. Hardly anybody asked me how I liked Vermont. Not a soul said 'Have a nice day!'

Jan Morris
I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

Jan Morris
I had reached the conclusion myself that sex was not a division but a continuum, that almost nobody was altogether of one sex or another, and that the infinite subtlety of the shading from one extreme to the other was one of the most beautiful of nature's phenomena.

Jan Morris
With a word processor I won't type the first few drafts on disk because there is the temptation simply to fiddle with the text, to juggle with it. The word processor is useful to me only for the final draft of the thing. I do think that the word processor for a writer's last draft is a wonderful thing because you can go on and on polishing the thing.

Jan Morris
Was there ever a name more full of purpose than Chicago's?... spoken as Chicagoans themselves speak it, with a bit of a spit to give heft to its slither, it is gloriously onomatopoetic.

Jan Morris
I'm old enough to remember the empire when it still was the empire. I was brought up in a world whose map was painted very largely red, and I went out into the world when I was young in a spirit of imperial arrogance. I felt, like most British people my age, that I was born to a birthright of supremacy; out I went to exert that supremacy.

Jan Morris