Quotes About Author

A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?

Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for Memoirs . There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire").

In the 1840s, after Charles Dickens toured the United States, he linked the American inclination to bloodshed with the barbarity of slavery.

said May when they reached Hampstead tube station.

In the theatre] Thanks.' He paused on the stairs. And good- Don't say it! yelled Helena. No whistling, no well-wishing. I thought you weren't superstitious. I'm not,' she said defiantly, 'but obviously there are limits.

Nothing in these woods could be more dreadful, more terrifying, than the selfish cruelty of ordinary people.

The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell.

Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.

I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told That's offensive as though those two words constitute an argument.

There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.

My hope is that literature can replace religion as the source of our ethics, without ceasing to be a pleasurable study and pursuit in its own right

Everything I love: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

I am sorry for those who have never had the experience of seeing the victory of a national liberation movement, and I feel cold contempt for those who jeer at it.

I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-sustaining and autonomously financed. Susan was pre-eminently one such.

It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison.

Every day one reads meretricious babble about 'globalization' and the abolition of frontiers, most of it amounting to little more than celebration of the worldwide availability of Wheel of Fortune .

To begin with a summary of Paine's astonishing life and career is to commence with a sense of wonder that he was ever able to emerge at all.

and showed him to be a villa-dwelling dependent and not an ascetic cave-dwelling guerrilla.

The usual duty of the intellectual is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae

Next time you hear that tone of self-regard, you might like to pick up Dispatches for the New York Tribune and read the only reporter of whom it was ever actually true.

Except that cancer isn't so … considerate.