274 Quotes by Anthony Powell

Parents - especially step-parents - are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

A dance to the music of time.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.