Quotes About Author

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

odorous as a crateful of bad eggs with the miasma of original sin.

Then there was another picture of some veck I thought I knew, and it was this Minister of the Inferior or Interior.

Oh, I'm dying,' I like moaned. 'Oh, I have a ghastly pain in my side. Appendicitis, it is. Ooooooh.' 'Appendy shitehouse,' grumbled this veck.

It is the novelist's innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

If the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea and the Nick Adams stories had been an undersized weed, asthmatic or phthisic, living out strong-man fantasies in the literature he produced, he would still be one of the great American writers.

No doubt even more unforeseen denouements lie in somebody's archive, though few remain to care about them.

Just as Schoenberg, in Adorno's phrase, liberated color as a compositional element in music (Schoenberg was himself a painter)

personal animosity resonated throughout essays written as if music, the most subjective of aesthetic forms, had been elevated to the objectivity of scientific principles.

It was like the Wizard of Oz had spoken, and what he said was too ludicrous to take seriously.

One of the requirements for the cameraman of the film was that he be completely invisible during this process, and Gavin was just the guy to do that, because he was mild-mannered and English.

I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.

What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight, he said, when he saw us. It makes me ashamed to be one.

He was saddled with the equally serious military – indeed, also civilian – handicap of chronic inability to be obsequious to superiors in rank, particularly when he found them uncongenial.

Women can be immensely obtuse about all kinds of things,' Barnby was fond of saying, 'but where the emotions are concerned their opinion is always worthy of consideration.

He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.

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

In Vishnu-land what Avatar?

The wine had the effect of making him discourse on racing, a subject regarding which I was myself unfortunately too ignorant to dispose as summarily as I should have wished of the almost certainly erroneous opinions he put forward.

The huge liquid eyes seemed to look deep down into my soul, and far, far beyond towards nameless, unexplored vistas of the infinite.

His shaggy homespun overcoat was swinging open, stuffed with long envelopes and periodicals which protruded from the pockets. He looked no older; perhaps a shade less sane.

He was wearing a grey flannel suit on which faint mauve squares were visible at close range. His face was bewildered. It was not uncommon for Shirley to register bewilderment.

Mrs. Dadds, who was telling a story about her chilblains, brought her narrative to a more or less satisfactory conclusion and paused to regain her breath.

if you make the decision to master your own mind, you'll be mentally equipped to handle whatever challenges come your way.