Malcolm Bradbury

“If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.”

“Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship”

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

“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.”

“You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.”

“Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, and people who didn't; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.”

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

“You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.”

“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.”

“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”

“The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.”

“Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?''It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.”

“Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.”

“Why is it that married people always say "Come in" when everything they do says "Get out"? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.”

“Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.”

“Well, it's really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us...and nothing.”

“The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I'm a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to extend himself to the full range of his powers to be civilized and good; yet his performance by and large has been intrinsically evil and could be more so as the extension continues.”