168 Quotes by Christopher Isherwood

She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.

Hollywood’s two polar types are the cynically drunken writer aggressively nursing a ten-year-old reputation and the theatrically self-conscious hermit who strides the boulevard in sandals, home-made shorts and a prophetic beard, muttering against the Age of the Machines.

Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it – some motive – some trick.

I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body – even this old beat-up carcass – that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!

Well, I think you’ll find that the soft ones object to being cheated even more than the others. They mind it more because they feel that they’ve only themselves to blame.

I hadn’t even the necessary credentials for schoolmastering – that last refuge of the unsuccessful literary man.