Anthony Powell Quotes

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

I get a warm feeling among my books.

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

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

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.

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.

Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil 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. Selflove seems so often unrequited.

Books do furnish a room.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

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

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

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

You have to be a product of the product.

[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

A dance to the music of time.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

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

An exceedingly well-informed report, ' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.

In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.

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

Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.

In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.

...in those days children were rather out of fashion.

One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.

Much of his time at Oxford passed by his own account under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He was dismayed by the undergraduates' relentless snobbery and unremitting emphasis on money.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.

Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.

Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.

Esteem for the army - never in this country regarded, in the continental manner, as a popular expression of the national will - implies a kind of innocence.

Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him.

One’s capacity for hearing about ghastly doings lessens with age.

In the seven years or so that had passed since I had last seen him, Sir Magnus Donners had grown not so much older in appearance, as less like a human being.

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

Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.

Bring a torch, if you've got one. It's as dark as hell and stinks of something far worse than cheese.