Quotes from Malcolm Bradbury

The business of a lecturer is, of course, to lecture. Petworth has not come this far,crossed two time-zones, found other skies and other birds,simply in order to answer toasts, to visit tombs, to worry about domestic disorders, to catch himself in the thorny thickets of sexual confusion, split loyalties, divided attachments,to know desire or despair, to fall in love with lady writers ; he has come to perform utterance.

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

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

One thing I have learned, my friend, there is no such thing as the future. The future is just what we invent in the present to put an order over the past.

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

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

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

Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they're too old and intelligent to want to.

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.

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.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work

On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.

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

If God had been a Liberal there wouldn't have been Ten Commandments, there would have been Ten Suggestions.

You must come out into the real world and face these problems sensibly and maturely. These lavatories are just an adolescent escape-mechanism, like going to the pictures; they're a dream world. You must come to terms with things, and not expect too much.

it lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The students could be, as it were (he said), the rubbing post for the thought of his teacher.

Unfortunately Marx said that the important thing is not to understand the world but to change it. Poor man, he got it the wrong way round. The important thing is not to change the world too much until you understand it.

Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic modality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?

This education we're giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that's what makes it so painful. We're showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves.

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

Have a little sociological beano. As you said - in sociology one can do anything and call it work.