Christopher Isherwood Quotes

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.

We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.

Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.

I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.

Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.

The sea only drowns its lovers.

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

Someone has to ask you a question," George continues meaningly, "before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested.

The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.

We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.

California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.

She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.

I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.

The past is just something that's over.

Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.

I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.

I seldom try to probe the mystery of my sloth. I have squandered a gigantic fortune of work hours... seems likely that I'll go on squandering till the very end.

The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

No one ever hates without a cause.

Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.

You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette.

In order to get the worst possible first impression of Los Angeles one should arrive there by bus, preferably in summer and on a Saturday night.

I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.

I must honor those who fight of their own free will, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.

George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.

A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.

Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.

Most of the time, thank goodness, we suffer quite stupidly and unreflectingly, like the animals.

Despair is something horribly simple.

It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.

If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.