Malcolm Bradbury Quotes

"Well," said Dr Jochum, "you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself."

A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.

'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'

'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires.'

[A]nd the traffic noise that boomed in through the window was another reminder of what his spirit knew, that he was but a grain of sand in someone else's desert.

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship.

All action leads to suffering, someone else's, or one's own.

You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience.

Jochum had said, "You keep asking the universe 'How ought I to live?' But it can't answer."

'I think, George,' says Merion, ' the trouble is that you don't have a conflict model of society.'

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.

It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity.

To you liberals, of course, goats are just sheep from broken homes.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.