Christopher Isherwood Quotes

United Kingdom, Novelist
August 26, 1904 – January, 4, 1986.

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an English-American novelist. His best-known works include The Berlin Stories (1935–39), two semi-autobiographical novellas inspired by Isherwood's time in Weimar Republic Germany. These enhanced his postwar reputation when they were adapted first into the play I Am a Camera (1951), then the 1955 film of the same name, I am a Camera; much later (1966) into the bravura stage musical Cabaret which was acclaimed on Broadway, and Bob Fosse's inventive re-creation for the film Cabaret (1972). His novel A Single Man was published in 1964 and adapted into the film of the same name in 2009.

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

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

Christopher Isherwood
- Doubt

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

Christopher Isherwood
- People
- Up
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

Christopher Isherwood
- Heart
What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.

Christopher Isherwood
- People
- Taken
- Attitude
The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent.

Christopher Isherwood
- Culture
I feel it's so easy to condemn this country the United States; but they don't understand that this is where the mistakes are being made - and made first, so that we're going to get the answers first.

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

Christopher Isherwood
- Country
- California

Christopher, like many other writers, was shockingly ignorant of the objective world, except where it touched his own experience. When he had to hide his ignorance beneath a veneer, he simply consulted someone who could supply him with the information he needed.

Christopher Isherwood
I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing.

Christopher Isherwood
I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the people were. 'Bill and Tony were constantly in and out. We went to La Jolla' - or something. I haven't the bluest idea who they were!

Christopher Isherwood
- People
- Remember
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

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

Christopher Isherwood
- Life
- Good
- Bad
I must honor those who fight of their own free willl, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.

Christopher Isherwood
- Free
- Courage
- Path

It seems to me that the real clue to your sex orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than in your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy having sex with him.

Christopher Isherwood
- Real
- Fall
- Sex
At one campus where I was lecturing, I asked a friend, 'How many of my colleagues know I'm gay?' He answered, 'All of them.' I wasn't surprised. But, just the same, it was kind of spooky, because not one of them had ever given me the faintest sign that he or she knew. If I had spoken about it myself, most of them would have felt it was in bad taste.

Christopher Isherwood
- She
- Bad
- Friend