Novelists From England

"When he left Quincy's he returned to the studios and went to see the man who was going to tell him everything he needed to know about sports broadcasting in twenty-five minutes. “The main thing,” said the expert, is to turn up on the right day at the right place and keep the sound recordists out of the bar. Leave everything else to the cameramen, and you'll do all right. That's it.”"

"“So you've never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?” “What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I can't say I have. It would be nice to change some things, naturally.” Jane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?” Vanderdecker considered. “I don't know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I can't actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”"

"“Look, miss,” he said, “if you think I'm getting any sort of thrill out of seeing two females in wetsuits and gasmasks chained to a railing, you’re working the wrong pitch. Try Amsterdam.”"

"Like fish, accountants see things in a different way from people, and details which people find unimportant are their reason for existing."

"It is galling, to say the least, to have been to every place in the world and then not know where somewhere is. It's rather like having a doctorate in semiconductor physics and not being able to wire a plug. You begin to wonder whether it's all been worthwhile."

"“What did you think,” he asked – with obvious restraint – “of the music?” “I got used to it,” she replied, after a bit. “Like a dripping tap,” she added."

"In a long life, reflected the Flying Dutchman, I have come across many bloody silly ideas, but two of them are in a class of their own for pure untainted idiocy. One was the Court of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and the other is the privatised British telephone service. A long way away, definitely in another continent and quite probably in another dimension, a little voice ask him to repeat the name."

"“That’s sad, in a way,” said King Hrolf. “I wouldn’t have minded being forgotten, but I’m not so keen on being debunked.” “Men die,” Hildy quoted, “cattle die, but the glory of heroes lives for ever. It’s just that these days people hate leaving well alone. They can’t bear anything to be noble and splendid anymore. But who knows? In a couple of hundred years or so, they may start believing in the old stories again. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”"

"“It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this. “The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium.”"

"An over-excited accountant, like the University of Hull, is a contradiction in terms."

"His role in history was rather like that of lettuce in the average salad; it achieves no useful purpose, but there's always a lot of it."

"All the great conspiracies of history have been bizarre, usually because of the incompetence of the leading conspirators."

"In the age of the supersonic airliner, a man can have breakfast in London and lunch in New York (if his digestion can stand it); but to get from Manchester to the north coast of Scotland between the waxing and the waning of the moon still requires not only dedication and cunning but also a modicum of good luck, just as it did in the Dark Ages."

"When Danny had recovered from the shock of impact, he tried to open his door, but a man in a grey suit with a helmet covering his face opened it for him and showed him the blade of a large axe. If this was the Milk Marketing Board, they were probably exceeding their statutory authority."

"“Give me your word of honour.” “On my word of honour,” said Danny. Obviously, he reflected, the man really didn’t know what a television producer was, or he would have demanded a different oath."

"“I’m an archaeologist,” said Hildy. “I dig up the past.” The king raised an eyebrow. “You mean you refresh old quarrels and keep alive old grievances? Surely not.” “No, no,” said Hildy, “I dig up ancient things buried in the earth. Things that belonged to people who lived hundreds of years ago.”… “Do you really?” said the King. “We used to call that grave-robbing.”"

"The authors of all the sagas she had read had been notably reticent about the cost of mass catering."

"But Hildy was no longer afraid. She had reached the point where fear can no longer help, and anger offers the only hope of survival."

"Wise is he who knows when to speak; wiser still, he who knows when to stay silent."

"He knew of course that there was such a thing as love, and that if you happen to come across it, as most people seem to do, it is not a thing that you can avoid, or that you should want to avoid. But you cannot go out and find it, because it is not that sort of creature. The phrase “to fall in love,” he realized, is a singularly apt one; it is something you blunder into, like a pothole. Very like a pothole."

"Malcolm listened to her laughter, and for the first time in his life he knew that everything was going to be all right. Niceness, he realized, it was not enough, and Love was only part of the rest. You had to have laughter, too. Laughter would make everything come out right in the end, or if it didn’t nobody would notice."

"“Humans!” laughed the male duck. “And it’s the likes of you run the world. No wonder the rivers are full of cadmium.”"

"It was an indescribably beautiful thing, with the perfection of line and form that only something designed to be functional can have, lean and graceful and infinitely menacing, like a man-eating swan."

"Perhaps it was some magic in those extraordinary letters, first created at a time when any writing was by definition magical, a secret mark on silent metal that could communicate without speech to the eyes of a wise lore-master. Runes cannot help being magical, even if what they spell out is commonplace."

"“It’ll be strange, of course. When I’m giving a lecture on Bothvar Bjarki and speculating on whether he was really just a sun-god motif imported from early Indo-European myth.” “Is he?” “Undoubtedly,” Hildy said. “The parallels are conclusive.” “I’ll tell him that,” said the King. “He’ll be livid.” “So are you,” she said, “probably. Or you’re an amalgamation of several pseudo-historical early dynasties, conflated by oral tradition and rationalised by the chroniclers. Your deeds are a fictionalized account of tribal disturbances during the Age of Migrations and you have no real basis in historical fact.” “Thank you, Vel-Hilda,” said the King. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.”"

"They don’t mean anything, you know. They hurt, but they’re only feelings. They don’t draw blood or make it difficult for you to breathe. They’re all in the mind. Life is about eating and drinking and sleeping and breathing and working, and not being more unhappy than you absolutely have to."

"Love? Love was a concept with which he was no longer comfortable. At his age, it did not do to take anything too seriously, and the depressing thing about love was the seriousness which had to go with it, just as these days you couldn't seem to get jumbo sausage and chips in a pub without a salad being thrown in as well."

"Suddenly, she was not pretty at all; she looked like a thousand-year-old teenager who wanted something she knew she couldn’t have."

"“You’re Loge, aren’t you? It’s odd. I was frightened of you when I thought you were the taxman, but now you turn out to be a God, I’m not frightened at all."

"And, like many missionaries, she was not above a little persecution in the cause of the communication of Enlightenment."

"You see, the last thing my daughter wants is to be happy. She’d hate it. No, what she wants is to be finally, definitively unhappy, and for it all to be my fault. It’d finally confirm all her dearest illusions about how her life has been ruined. People like that would far rather be right than happy."

"It was irritating to have one’s physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger."

"Malcolm had never been greatly inclined to metaphysical or religious speculation, but he had hoped that if there was a supreme being or divine agency, it would at least show the elements of logic and common sense in its actions. Seemingly, not so. On the other hand, the revelation that the destiny of the world had been shaped by a bunch of verbose idiots went some way towards explaining the problems of human existence."

"And what do they like doing best of all? They like taking off all their clothes—clothes over which they have expended so much effort and ingenuity—and doing biologically necessary but profoundly undignified things to other human beings. Any pig or spider can do that, it’s the easiest thing in the world. But you bloody humans, who can do so much that no other species could ever do, you can’t do that efficiently. You agonize over it. You make an incredible fuss over it. You get it all wrong, you make each others’ lives miserable, you write dreary letters and take overdoses. You even invent a medicine that deliberately makes the whole process futile. My God, what a species!"

"Once again, Malcolm was moved to wonder at the stupidity, or at least the obscurity, of the King of the Gods; evidently the sort of person who, if asked to rescue a cat from a roof, would tackle the problem by burning the house down."

"And so you give this irregularity in your minds a name of its own. You call it Love, which is meant to make everything all right. Rather than try and sort it out or find a vaccine, you go out of your way to glorify it. I mentioned your art and your poetry just now. What are your favorite themes? Love and War. The two things that any species can do, and which most species do much more sensibly than you lot—screwing and killing—are the things you humans single out to make a song and dance about. Literally."

"Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? Besides, I never could be doing with lawyers. Did you ever meet a lawyer whose life you would willingly have saved in the event of fire? Not me."

"“But isn’t everybody the same? Don’t the Gods and Goddesses ever fall in love? And didn’t you once to try and chat up the Rhinedaughters?” Alberich winced. “It is true that the High Gods do you occasionally fall in love. You have, as a matter of fact, singled out the one race nuttier than your own.”"

"I see what you mean about making a will, actually, although I still maintain that forty quid spent on deciding what's going to happen after you're dead is a waste of good beer money."

"She thought that most women make a great mistake in allowing dress to be the master instead of the servant of their good looks; many women were, she considered, entirely crushed and made insignificant by the beauty of their clothes."

"Somehow she had thought of him so much that when she actually saw him again her affection seemed cooler. Had she worn out the passion by dint of constancy?"

"He had no special hobbies, but he needed luxury in general of a kind, and especially the luxury of getting things in a hurry, his theory being that everything comes to the man who won't wait."

"Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from."

"Like all weddings it had left the strange feeling of futility, the slight sense of depression that comes to English people who have tried, from their strong sense of tradition, to be festive and sentimental and in high spirits too early in the day. The frame of mind supposed to be appropriate to an afternoon wedding can only be genuinely experienced by an Englishman at two o'clock in the morning."

"On the first occasion she had sat next Henry James at dinner, she had not been able to resist putting to him certain questions about his books, for she had been a lifelong admirer of them, and that, at last, after he had answered some of these murmured inquiries, he had turned his melancholy gaze upon her, and had said to her, "Can it be— it must be— that you are that embodiment of the incorporeal, the elusive yet ineluctable being to whom through the generations novelists have so unavailingly made invocation; in short, the Gentle Reader? I have often wondered in what guise you would appear or, as it were, what incarnation you would assume.""

"As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated."

"Lady Cannon's gone to a matinée at the St. James's. We had tickets for the first night, but of course she wouldn't use them then. She preferred to go alone in the afternoon, because she detests the theatre, anyhow, and afternoon performances give her a headache. If she does a thing that's disagreeable to her, she likes to do it in the most painful possible way. She has a beautiful nature."

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."

"My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything."

"The mountain sheep are sweeter But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it...As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off."