Malcolm Bradbury Quotes
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Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
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'Well,' said Dr Jochum, 'you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself.'
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Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.
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If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.
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English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
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..., and 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.
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You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.
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The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.
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My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.
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'I think, George,' says Merion, ' the trouble is that you don't have a conflict model of society.'
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'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'
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I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.
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'Well, yes, surely I think everybody ought to enjoy life as much as it's humanly possible because that's why we exist. I believe.'
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In Slaka, sex is just politics with the clothes off.
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'Oh, everybody exploits somebody,' says Howard, 'in this social order it's part of the human lot.'
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It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity.
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Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship.
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With sociology one can do anything and call it work.
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'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires.'
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'The trouble is, it's hard to know you're little,' says Felicity. 'People like to make themselves matter.'
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'All action leads to suffering, someone else's, or one's own.'
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'... You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience.'
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The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they're too old and intelligent to want to.
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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.