Malcolm Bradbury Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

Malcolm Bradbury
I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

Malcolm Bradbury
The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

Malcolm Bradbury
My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.

Malcolm Bradbury
Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

Malcolm Bradbury
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

Malcolm Bradbury
With sociology one can do anything and call it work.

Malcolm Bradbury
[...] You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience.

Malcolm Bradbury
It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity.

Malcolm Bradbury
"We got a course in picknicking at the university," said Dr. Bourbon. "It's called Geology, but it's really picknicking."

Malcolm Bradbury
'All action leads to suffering, someone else's, or one's own.'

Malcolm Bradbury
Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.

Malcolm Bradbury
'The trouble is, it's hard to know you're little,' says Felicity. 'People like to make themselves matter.'

Malcolm Bradbury
[...], and the traffic noise that boomed in through the window was another reminder of what his spirit knew, that he was but a grain of sand in someone else's desert.

Malcolm Bradbury
What a pleasant life might be had in this world by a handsome, sensible old lady of good fortune, blessed with a sound constitution and a firm will.

Malcolm Bradbury
Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.

Malcolm Bradbury
'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'

Malcolm Bradbury
A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

Malcolm Bradbury
Well, yes, surely I think everybody ought to enjoy life as much as it's humanly possible because that's why we exist. I believe.

Malcolm Bradbury
'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires.'

Malcolm Bradbury
In Slaka, sex is just politics with the clothes off.

Malcolm Bradbury
"Well," said Dr Jochum, "you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself."

Malcolm Bradbury
Of course, as Henry James says, the house of fiction has many windows. Your trouble is you seem to have stood in front of most of them.

Malcolm Bradbury
'Oh, everybody exploits somebody,' says Howard, 'in this social order it's part of the human lot.'

Malcolm Bradbury
To you liberals, of course, goats are just sheep from broken homes.

Malcolm Bradbury