Novelists From England

"There are writers who exist to confirm people's feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That's the opposite to what I do. I'm presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood."

"Although he came to the United States frequently and for several decades lived part of each year at the in New York, Mr. Waugh was not particularly famous in this country, except for the 1956 Island in the Sun. The colorful story of love, murder and political intrigue on the imaginary Caribbean island of Santa Maria was a book-club selection, was condensed in and was sold to the movies for a that starred , , , and ."

"In Russia love was regarded with suspicion as a deterrent to the social obligations of the Soviet citizen."

"”Only the superficial do not judge by appearances," Wilde had said, mocking at society; and he had been right. Life was a sham, a mass of muddled evolutions; the world was too slack to find out the truth, or perhaps it was afraid to discover it. For the truth was not pleasant. Gordon did not know what it was; all he saw was that life was built of shams, that no one worshipped anything but the god of things that seem. He lay supine, cursing at the darkness."

"A good deal of fun is involved in the launching of a . It is exciting to see one's name placarded all over London; there was a bigger space for posters in the front of then. Bus after bus announced my story."

"I am prepared to believe that a slightly impairs the palate, but think what it does to the soul."

"... I am not a very serious person. I am a storyteller and an entertainer, the direct descendant of those wandering s who in the Middle Ages were classified as rogues and vagabonds. The stock of the status of the novelist may have gone up in recent years, and there are a number of novelists who seem to claim a position of a prophet, a leader, an advisor, one of the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, but I think when one comes to the last analysis, that our ancestor is rather than , ... and I myself certainly think of myself and my brother storytellers not so much as leaders of men into action as the idle singers of an empty day"

"I returned to civilian life, agreeing with , that the first duty of a wine was to be red, adding my own corollary that its second duty was to be ."

"I had reached shortly after breakfast. Letters of introduction had gone ahead of me, and within three hours I was sipping a very dry martini on the balcony of a bungalow situated on the far side of the mountain range that divides the island. A thousand feet below me 'the bright blue meadow a bay' washed in varying shades of green and turquoise against a long . Beyond it stretched an archipelago of islands, some British, some American, some a bare grazing ground for goats."

"... Maugham would not have been the writer he became had his marriage been a success. Nor would Evelyn. He made his first trip to in the autumn of 1930; for six years he was on the move. Until his marriage had been annulled he could not remarry. Those six years of travel gave him the material he needed. He could not have taken a wife upon those travels, certainly not , who was delicate in health. A novelist to get the material he needs must travel alone or with another man. Had the Evelyns’ marriage been a success, he would, with his absorption in the world of fashion, have concentrated on social satires that might well have become brittle and superficial. Did She-Evelyn subconsciously realize that? Her marriage to was short-lived, but she was genuinely in love with him at the beginning. Would she, though, have been prepared to let herself fall in love with him — there is always a point at which one can draw back — had she not felt that since the success of Decline and Fall she was cast in the wrong role? The “he-Evelyn, she- Evelyn, ‘Orphans of the Storm’ Idyll” had been one thing; it was quite another to be the wife, companion, confidante, counselor, and bastion of a great man of letters — the role that Laura Herbert was to fill later, so gladly, so proudly, so lovingly, and with so triumphant a success."

"are not a profitable form of writing; their sale is usually small but they have for the author the satisfaction of possessing reference value. They hold their place on library shelves and are consulted by the student and the traveller long after novels that enjoyed a brief bright summer are utterly forgotten, I do not suppose that it would pay a publisher to reissue today 's English in the West Indies, 's Cradle of the Deep, or 's If Crab No Walk, but those three books provide indispensable research material. It is of value to learn how certain places struck people twenty, fifty, eighty years ago."

"As military regulations state that it is the duty of every to make immediate and strenuous effort to escape, and as every man is at heart an adventurer, it is not surprising that our languid community was from time to time regaled by the rumours of impending sorties."

"To the as to the Arabs, a sleek, well-fed appearance was something to be proud of, a proof of prosperity and success. It was assumed that any man who could afford to would "do himself well." A thin man was either unhealthy or poor—both of which were crimes in the 1870s."

"My friends used to wonder how I could afford to do so much travelling. But actually travel was an economy for me. I did not have to indulge in costly entertaining. My social life was provided by the ships in which I travelled, and in the islands that I visited I was a guest more often than often than a host. I never during 1951 had a substantial credit balance at my bank more than once I received one of those notes so typical of English banking, 'Your account appears to be £23. 11.6. We shall be glad to received your instructions in this matter.' But I was never insolvent."

"There comes some time an end to all things, to the good and to the bad."

"Forensic procedure is an art form, nothing less. No, I'll go further: it's higher, more refined, than any art form. Why? Because it's real. Take just one aspect of it—say the diagrams: with all their outlines, arrows and shaded blocks they look like abstract paintings, avant-garde ones from the last century—dances of shapes and flows as delicate and skilful as the markings on butterflies' wings. But they're not abstract at all. They're records of atrocities. Each line, each figure, every angle—the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of white paper: something has happened here, someone has died."

"People never stop to think about these basic facts when they watch wars and cop shows on the television. People take too much for granted. Each time a gun is fired the whole history of engineering comes into play. Of politics, too: war, assassination, revolution, terror. Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of the past."

"About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That's it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know. It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that—well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being about to be—hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers."

"Surplus matter. I'd forgotten all about that phrase, those classes—even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually—but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important."

"Poor Naz. He wanted everything to be perfect, neat, wanted all matter organized and filed away so that it wasn't mess. He had to learn too: matter's what makes us alive—the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world's very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril."

"In the part of the night where it's quietest, around three or four o'clock, I started wondering where this black man's soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we're alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn't just vaporize—it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark."

"It was like a quilt, a handmade, patterned quilt laid out for this man to take his final steps across and then lie down and die on: a quilted deathbed. It struck me that the world, or chance, or maybe death itself if you can speak of such a thing, must have loved this man in some way to prepare for him such a richly textured fabric to gather and wrap him up in."

"It struck me as I waited that all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics. Building pyramids or landing spacecraft on Jupiter or invading whole continents or painting divine scenes over the roofs of chapels: logistics."

"The Forlorn Hope was for the brave. It may have been a courage born of desperation, or foolhardiness, but it was courage just the same. (pg. 13)"

"Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money."

"I like my women in a few wisps of drapery: then I can hope for a chance to remove the wisps. If they start out with nothing I tend to get depressed because either they have just stripped off for someone else or, in my line of work, they are usually dead."

"Some men are born lucky. Others are born Marcus Didius Falco."

"Popular men who laugh at your jokes pose a threat which blatant villains can never command."

"In my experience, men who sit in corners are the ones to watch."

"It struck me there might be a reason why Helena Justina whipped along at such a cracking pace: she did not want to be stuck in the wilderness with my corpse. I thanked Jove for her ruthless good sense. I did not want my corpse to be stuck with her in any case."

"'How old now?' 'Thirty. Downhill to the dark boat across the Styx. Probably be sick over the side in Charon's ferry too…'"

"Emperors must make their own rules."

"Senator, don't let your judgement be warped by one heady moment."

"I would rather see Rome ruled by a man who once had to ask his accountant tricky questions before his steward could pay the butcher’s bill than by some mad limb like Nero, who was brought up believing himself the son and the grandson of gods, and who thought wearing the purple gave him free rein to indulge his personal vanities, execute real talent, bankrupt the Treasury, burn half of Rome – and bore the living daylights out of paying customers in theatres!"

"You could tell those two had been married by the way that she ignored him."

"There comes a point for a nut-lover, Quintus thought, where funeral food is worth taking a risk, even when you are dining with a megalomaniac who wants to kill you."

"Think of tonight as having a real purpose. Yes, it is dining with the dead in order to be at one with our ancestors, but at the same time, a good scoff in shared company provides solace for the unhappy, it anneals the internal stress of bereavement, it helps the living along the path of their recovery from grief.” “That’s a useful motto for a caterer!"

"[Y]ou would think happy wedding guests would tuck in with gusto—yet ... [i]t’s mourners at funerals who scoff.” “Because this is food as human comfort, plus respect for the national gods. We are one with our ancestors and one with our fellow mourners."

"Sometimes information you barely noticed consciously comes back to you of its own accord."

"Curiosity is a terrible inducement."

"They were not beggars; well, not in the usual sense. They were Christians, who wanted not just my nephews' money but their souls."

"Their work was undercover—yet their existence unconcealed. That is how fear works."

"Do we think Locusta is still alive?” “If so, she would have to be about two hundred.” “Sipping at the Fountain of Youth?” “No, I think she was killed in the Year of the Four Emperors.” “Poison?” “Natural causes—execution.” “Did she train up apprentices?” “Yes, but the old crafts are dying. No one wants to be bothered. These days you can’t find suppliers with the expertise, however big a bribe you offer."

"He had the kind of personality that makes you think a boy will grow up to be a public torturer."

"I despise women who rely on men entirely for their own existence."

"A wise partner does not come between her man and his best friend."

"Sometimes you run away by yourself purely so someone who cares will come to find you. Half the time nobody does. That's the tragedy of life."

"No woman who builds a career on hard work and talent will ever compliment a much younger one who uses the shallow gift of her looks."

"If being hit on the head by a falling flower tub could be worth cash to the victim, what price a child’s life under civil law?"

"To know another person's fortune smacks of wanting to control their fate for the wrong reasons."