E.M. Forster Quotes

How few writers can prostitute all their powers!

There are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider.

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

It was unbearable, and he thought again, 'How unhappy I am!' and became happier.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

This solitude opressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

'A friend,' he repeated, sentimental suddenly. 'Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can't really happen outside sleep.'

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.

I think - I think - I think how little they think what lies so near them.

It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.

I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand!

If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.

She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.

There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

'Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.

Do you remember Italy?

Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.

He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.

The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.

All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.

Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Riposte of "that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical," Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

I always try to stay objective, and to remove myself from the process and look at the film again.

Some of the greatest directors never got an Oscar, like Kubrick, or Hitchcock. For me, personally, I think the body of work is more important than winning an Oscar.

You do a lot of press, but getting to talk and discuss movies with your peers is the best and most fulfilling part.

For me, The Kite Runner became about a guy who’s emotionally shut down because he hasn’t confronted his past.

The key thing is that you start every film from sort of a blank page, almost like you discover it like a child discovers a new world.