Quotes from Anthony Powell

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

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

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.

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.

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

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

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

He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

I get a warm feeling among my books.

Books do furnish a room.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

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.

The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.

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

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

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

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.

Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.

Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.

It doesn't do to read too much,' Widmerpool said. 'You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.

Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?' 'I don't know,' said Moreland. 'Love means such different things to different people.