Quotes from Malcolm Bradbury

If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.

Life is a crisis - so what!

Why is it that married people always say Come in when everything they do says Get out? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work.

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

Well, it's really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us...and nothing.

Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.

Maybe one reason so many people have so many problems is that there are so many other people with so many solutions. (Love on a Gunboat)

Marriage, [...], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

With my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. The problems aren't answered in the end because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world.

This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.

After all, the function of a vacation is regenerative, not luxurious. It's to restore our equipment so that we can live our ordinary lives better.

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.

One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it's a question of one's humanity.

There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.

If Caribbean writers have one single unifying theme, it is a strong sense of place, and of home. There is also - always, beneath the humour, which is a West Indian characteristic - a sadness: an awareness of a past that can never really be forgotten, or forgiven.

Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?' 'It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.

The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I'm a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to extend himself to the full range of his powers to be civilized and good; yet his performance by and large has been intrinsically evil and could be more so as the extension continues.

Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, and people who didn't; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.

Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.

One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.