61 Quotes by Malcolm Bradbury

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship.

But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don’t recognize that, then that’s the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else’s fate to some extent.

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.

Life is a crisis – so what!

With my sort of book there’s no resolution, because there’s no solution. The problems aren’t answered in the end because there is no answer. They’re problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It’s not a beautiful world.

Unfortunately Marx said that the important thing is not to understand the world but to change it. Poor man, he got it the wrong way round. The important thing is not to change the world too much until you understand it.

Most beds aren’t as intimate as people think they are.

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.

One thing I have learned, my friend, there is no such thing as the future. The future is just what we invent in the present to put an order over the past.