61 Quotes by Malcolm Bradbury

One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.

This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work.

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

After all, the function of a vacation is regenerative, not luxurious. It's to restore our equipment so that we can live our ordinary lives better.

If Caribbean writers have one single unifying theme, it is a strong sense of place, and of home. There is also - always, beneath the humour, which is a West Indian characteristic - a sadness: an awareness of a past that can never really be forgotten, or forgiven.

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

The whole point of marriage is to stop you getting anywhere near real life. You think it's a great struggle with the mystery of being. It's more like being smothered in warm cocoa. There's sex, but it's not what you think. Marvellous, for the first fortnight. Then every Wednesday. If there isn't a good late-night concert on the Third. Meanwhile you become a biological functionary. An agent of the great female womb, spawning away, dumping its goods in your lap for succour. Daddy, daddy, we're here, and we're expensive.

To put it another way: a conference is an elite meeting on equal terms; a congress is a group of elites meeting on opposite terms; a convention is a mob meeting on equal terms; a course is an elite instructing a mob; and a colloquium is a group capable of considering all these phenomena.