Novelists From England

"'The trouble is, it's hard to know you're little,' says Felicity. 'People like to make themselves matter.'"

"We got a course in picknicking at the university," said Dr. Bourbon. "It's called Geology, but it's really picknicking."

"The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth."

"'I think, George,' says Merion, ' the trouble is that you don't have a conflict model of society.'"

"You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience."

"My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely."

"Well," said Dr Jochum, "you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself."

"[A]nd 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."

"'It must be nice to think there is a true reality,' says Miss Callendar. 'I've always found reality a matter of great debate.'"

"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."

"I love little pussy, her coat is so warm; And if I don't hurt her she'll do me no harm."

"It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity."

"I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world."

"With sociology one can do anything and call it work."

"I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar."

"Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it."

"is the story of a marriage. It was written out of experience and disappointment, and out of a kind of triumph. Marriage is appalling, says Bennett, but it is worth it. And he was well qualified to make the statement."

"Success is often described as a damaging thing for a writer, not so much because money is the root of all evil, but because it cuts him away from the material which is his strength. Arnold Bennett is probably the very best example of that in literature. When he was writing about the , he wrote magnificently because he wrote of what he knew in his veins, what is in his blood, his sinews. That is what he had known in his childhood and early years. When big success came, and he came up to London and he moved in a vivid and fashionable world, among very much more interesting people, very much more important people than he had known as a boy, he wrote nothing that was convincing; he described s, s, and restaurants in the . His work became... it was like cut flowers; it had no roots in itself, and this particular problem is worrying the novelist all the time because he knows he’s not getting the right material for his books."

"And, having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense."

"Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true."

"Yes books are valuable. But not reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do - of a steady looking at one's self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be)."

"A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour."

"A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it."

"Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They can't give their entire attention to it."

"The price of justice is eternal publicity."

"Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man."

"She opens her case with an account of her own experience — she married three times and twice it was rotten — and goes on to list, throughout the ages, the devastation perpetuated in the name of love. ... I disagree with some of her book. She chronicles a horrific list of cruelties and repressions practiced in the name of love and she infers that it is the exception rather than the rule that people know how to love one another. She must be wrong. What about all those millions of human beings who, long before the welfare state, despite misery, hunger and disease, mostly managed to care for each other with charity and tenderness? I don't know why any of us should presume that we're here to do anything very special, except procreate ..."

"Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood."

"They were burning the stubbled fields and a great stain of smoke flooded the horizon. Nothing amiss here, nothing derelict, the roofs newly thatched, the hedges trimmed, the gardens bright with flowers."

"My husband, Austin Davies, taught John Lennon at . In fact, the night we separated, my husband had a party in our house to which the Beatles, John Lennon, —the one who died—and I can’t remember who else, came. The party went on for three days and nights; I moved out down the road to a friend’s house with the children, and later we divorced amicably. I never saw the Beatles again."

"We would do better to make our judgments on society from a study of literature, for in fiction the concept of division becomes fact — from Disraeli's Sybil with its subtitle 'The Two Nations' and Mrs Gaskell's North & South, through George Eliot, Dickens and Hardy to Lawrence's ' and the ' of , the novel is choked with the theme of a people divided not only by borders but by circumstances of birth and opportunity."

"Beryl Bainbridge, who has died of cancer aged 75, wore her hard-won recognition lightly. She was acknowledged as one of the best novelists of her generation, and was made a in 2000, but she lost none of her black humour or raffish image to her new status as a literary grande dame. Her prolific output included 18 novels, three of which were filmed, two collections of short stories, several plays for stage and television, and many articles, essays, columns and reviews. She won the and two , but although five of her novels reached the shortlist – The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), Every Man for Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998) – none of them won it. She bore the disappointment with a wit and detachment honed by a lifetime's practice."

"I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books and I never understand why they don't. After all, everyone speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say."

"Being constantly with the children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters."

"Anyway. #MeToo."

"I have C-PTSD. I wonder why? His "compassionate writings" on mental illness make me want to throw up."

"I changed the locks long ago. He’s been litigating against me for more than two years, and I’m broke. I can’t afford a restraining order."

"My ex wants to divide up the contents of the former marital home by coming round, when I’m not there, putting a red dot on absolutely anything he wants, then getting me to organise it all into a place where he can have it picked up. Anyone else had this?"

"Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator."

"Things are only boring if you are boring."

"Campaigning at a school in Enfield in 2001, Tony Blair was caught unawares by a feisty British Asian sixth-former. Suddenly this apparition arose before him, demolishing Blair's points as speedily as he tried to make them. This time around the New Labour machine haven't wanted to risk any of that. The Emperor has been ferried from Potemkin village to Potemkin hospital, and before he arrives a rigged rent-a-crowd of "ordinary people" are brought in to wave little flags. Journalists have been "embedded" - undoubtedly the cadres were hoping that these trusties would begin to sympathise with the man upon whom their jobs depended [and] they'd cease to notice how much of what he said was utter shit."

"The éminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne."

"There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy than connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply…the person who wants to read what I have written."

"I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer."

"I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form."

"So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal."

"No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken."

"His voice is commanding. He is often invited to read his work, the flow of his language enlivening the text. In appearance he is impressive, and yet there is very little aggression or intimidation in his look. Indeed, one admirer has said that her first thought sitting opposite him was that this was what God should look like “when you get there.”"

"The feminist school has often looked in a manner of marked disapproval at her husband, Ted Hughes. I find it difficult to imagine him actually maltreating Sylvia physically, but there’s no doubt that he could be quite stupendously wanting in sensitivity."

"The idea occurred to me that art was perhaps this—the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others too, as a medicine. Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it. However it comes out — whether a design in a carpet, a painting on a wall, the shaping of a doorway — we recognize that medicinal element because of the instant healing effect, and we call it art. It consoles and heals something in us. That’s why that aspect of things is so important, and why what we want to preserve in civilizations and societies is their art — because it’s a living medicine that we can still use. It still works. We feel it working. Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry this healing. Poetry does it more intensely. Music, maybe, most intensely of all."