Quotes from Anthony Powell

The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

What you say, Nick, strengthens my contention that only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition. Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so truth goes astray. The novelist is more serious—if that is the word.

That was when I began to suspect that being in love might be a complicated affair.

he had been curious to set eyes again on an old flame. He was also prepared to admit to himself that he was not unwilling to exhibit to her gaze as presentable a façade as could reasonably be attained without too much effort.

Aggressive activities against crayfish might be, by definition, excluded from an afternoon's programme devoted to Harmony. Who could tell?

Even then I did not recognise the quest for power.

Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.

Short's power to define feminine beauty abandoned him at this point. He simply made a gesture with his hand.

It was realisation, in a moment of time, not only of her own possibilities, far from inconsiderable ones, but also of other possibilities that life might hold; and my chief emotion was surprise.

He continually thought of Lucy. But he did not think anything definite about her. He merely thought of her.

In any case fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another. They cannot be properly equated.

The lively, gleaming little Jewess in a scarlet frock, who came into the room on the heels of Lady Anne, was announced as 'Miss Manasch', and addressed by the Walpole-Wilsons as 'Rosie'. Both

I could not remember the story with sufficient clarity.

Cortney at times seemed unnerved by Da Costa's general appearance and manner, but most of all by his clothes, which, as always, looked as if they had been made by a good tailor for someone of quite different shape.

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.

In Vishnu-land what Avatar?

Rusty wore jeans, Fiona a long skirt that swept the ground. Dragging its flounces across the damp grass, she looked like a mediaeval lady from the rubric of an illuminated Book of Hours, a remote princess engaged in some now obsolete pastime.

For lust of knowing what we should not know,' he was fond of intoning, 'we take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

BEING in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one:

It had neither memories of the past nor hope for the future.

The mere phrase 'artificial manure' told the whole story.

A complicated situation appeared merely to be accumulating additional complicated factors.

Everything alters, yet does remain the same. It might even improve matters.