Short Story Writers From England

"The result of the rebuilding was a maze of crooked stairways, claustrophobic passages, abrupt dangerous ramps and Alice in Wonderland doors. Most of the smaller rooms were overcrowded, under-ventilated, separated only by plywood partitions and lit by naked bulbs hanging from wires. Everything was provisional, and liable to electrocute you, fall on your head, or come apart in your hand."

"'Why should you do a job anyway? What's the incentive?' 'The incentive is to fight anarchy. That's all Man lives for. Reclaiming life from its natural muddle. Making patterns.' 'Patterns for what?' 'For the sake of patterns. To create meaning. What else is there?' 'And what about the things that won't fit into your patterns?' 'Discard them.'"

"'Let me tell you something,' he began, as he dropped my manuscript casually into the waste-paper-basket. 'The Film is a symphony. Each movement is written in a certain key. There is a note which has to be chosen and struck immediately. It is characteristic of the whole. It commands the attention.' He started to describe the opening sequence. It was astounding. Everything came to life. The trees began to tremble in the evening breeze, the music was heard, the roundabouts were set in motion. And the people talked. Bergmann improvised their conversation, partly in German, partly in ridiculous English; and it was vivid and real. It was all so simple, so effective, so obvious. Why hadn't I thought of it myself?"

"The images which remained in the memory are not in themselves terrible or rigorous: they are of boot-lockers, wooden desks, lists on boards, name-tags in clothes — yes, the name pre-eminently; the name which in a sense makes you nameless, less individual rather than more so: Bradshaw-Isherwood, C.W. in its place on some alphabetical list; the cold daily, hourly reminder that you are not the unique, the loved, the household’s darling, but just one among many. I suppose that this loss of identity is really much of the painfulness which lies at the bottom of what is called Homesickness; it is not Home that one cries for but one’s home-self."

"I believe the Gita to be one of the major religious documents of the world. If its teachings did not seem to me to agree with those of the other gospels and scriptures, then my own system of values would be thrown into confusion, and I should feel completely bewildered. The Gita is not simply a sermon, but a philosophical treatise."

"'You know, sometimes I wonder what all this is for. Why not just peacefully end it?' 'We all think that. But we don't do it.' 'Surely you're not fool enough to imagine there's anything afterwards?' 'Perhaps. No, I suppose not. I don't think it makes much difference.'"

"'The whole beauty of the Film is that it has a certain fixed speed. The way you see it is mechanically conditioned. I mean, take a painting - you can just glance at it, or you can stare at the left hand top corner for half an hour. Same thing with a book. The author can't stop you from skimming it, or staring at the last chapter and reading backwards. The point is, you choose your approach. When you go into a cinema it's different. There's the film, and you have to look at it as the director wants you to look at it. He makes his points, one after another, and he allows you a certain number of seconds or minutes to grasp each one. If you miss anything he won't repeat himself, and he won't stop to explain. He can't. He's started something and he has to go through with it.'"

"If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate — the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters. I fear the way I might behave, if I were exposed to this atmosphere. I shrink from the duty of opposition. I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Christopher’s kind are homosexuals, but more importantly, minorities of any sort, either tortured obscenely by the Nazis or rejected more hypocritically by social convention and snobbism. In his matter-of-fact treatment of his sexual preferences and affairs ("To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys," he announces at the start), Isherwood has made an important contribution to the literature of minority liberation. … Our age, like the Thirties, is given to strident political and artistic positions; while it would be wrong to condemn the more active spokesmen of minority rights, it is all the more significant that the tone (that most ineffable of all literary qualities) of Isherwood’s autobiography is neither truculent nor confessional, but the still, honest voice of a man looking back on the events of a tumultuous time. He shows how all minorities can be persecuted, by laws (the notorious paragraph 175 of the German penal code which made homosexual acts illegal), in social condescension (even from sympathetic parties, like Christopher’s mother), and most grotesquely, in self-hatred. The book’s central episode (the midpoint of the book brings us to the mid-point of the decade) deals with Isherwood’s inability to get his German boyfriend out of Germany; at the last moment, victory is snatched away when Heinz is refused entry by a British immigration official at Harwich in 1934. Christopher and Auden have gone to the pier, and after Heinz is turned back, Auden chillingly notes of the official: "As soon as I saw the bright-eyed little rat, I knew we were done for. He understood the whole situation at a glance — because he’s one of us." Christopher and His Kind is a proclamation of the rights of "us," all of us, against the demands of "the others," whether fascists, aristocrats, war-makers, or the heterosexual hegemony, to live according to our natures."

"'We don't think enough [about the lot] of the other fellow, and that's a fact.'"

"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."

"The Memorial was published on February 17, 1932. . . . I remember how one reviewer remarked that he had at first thought the novel contained a disproportionally large number of homosexual characters but had decided, on further reflection, that there were a lot more homosexuals about, nowadays."

"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."

"According to Christopher’s diary:"

"But to me, an exercise in style is not a superficial matter – our lives are also an exercise in style."

"[Q:] What moves you most in a literary work? [A:] Ingenuity, honesty, perversity, bravery and — I must admit — natural talent. I feel the same wonder at a brilliant debut as I do watching Simone Biles doing her back flips."

"[Q:] What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? [A:] the writers that meant most to me: Alice Walker, Roald Dahl, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Noel Streatfeild, Andrew Salkey, L. Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott. Toni Morrison because of The Black Book, which she edited — and I read, at a very delicate age, 9 or 10. But C. S. Lewis above all."

"In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time."

"You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies."

"It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love."

"He traced the genealogy of the feeling"

"But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas—it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone."

"He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice."

"Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow."

"His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end."

"He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire. The kind of talk that only increases it."

"Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express."

"The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free."

"A past tense, future perfect kind of night."

"A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor."

"But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not."

"So we have to be a bit more, I mean, military about it, like plan."

"Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dot's enthusiast's wet dream."

"..and the devil won another easy hand in God's poker game."

"The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes shit happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie."

"This is what divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love."

"… dressed all in yellow spreading warmth and the promise of sex."

"The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned to heaven."

"As a reader, I want to claim fellowship with "good writing" without limits; to be able to say that Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother, and so is Kafka my brother, and Nabokov, and Woolf my sister, and Eliot and Ozick. Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count."

"You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.' Now how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time."

"… and catholics give out forgiveness at the same time politicians give out promises and whores give out."

"His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out."

"Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature. They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies."

"You always wanted to make it clear you weren't like the rest of us. You're still doing it."

"Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair that when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee's mother."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."