Malcolm Bradbury Quotes & Sayings

On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space. — Malcolm Bradbury

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship — Malcolm Bradbury

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

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

I've noticed your hostility towards him ... I ought to have guessed you were friends. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

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

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

Marriage, [ ... ], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

Here we have a saying: a good friend is someone who visits you when you are in prison. But a really good friend is someone who comes to hear your lectures. — Malcolm Bradbury

There is a girl behind the desk in blue uniform, with dark red hair, spread fanlike from her head in lacquered splendour; she looks at them without interest. 'Hallo, dolling,' says Lubijova, 'Here is Professor Petwurt, reservation of the Min'stratii Kulturi, confirmation here.' 'So, Petvurt?' the girl says, taking a pen from her hair and running it languidly down the columns of a large book. 'Da, Pervert, so, here is. Passipotti. ' 'She likes your passport, don't give it to her, says Lubijova, 'Give it to me. I know these people well, they are such bureaucrats. Now, dolling, tell me, how long do you keep?' 'Tomorrow,' says the girl, 'It registers with the police. — Malcolm Bradbury

The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they're too old and intelligent to want to. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

With sociology one can do anything and call it work — Malcolm Bradbury

Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better? — Malcolm Bradbury

One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it's a question of one's humanity. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail. — Malcolm Bradbury

T lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The students could be, as it were (he said), the rubbing post for the thought of his teacher. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

Life is a crisis - so what! — Malcolm Bradbury

This education we're giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that's what makes it so painful. We're showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves. — Malcolm Bradbury

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

Maybe one reason so many people have so many problems is that there are so many other people with so many solutions." (Love on a Gunboat") — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

There's always something or someone to do.'But don't you ever find it too much work, Howard?' asks Flora, 'All this dressing and undressing, all these undistinguished climaxes, all this chasing for more of the same, is it really, really, worth the effort?'Of course' [ ... ]. — Malcolm Bradbury

If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions. — Malcolm Bradbury

If God had meant us to have group sex, he'd have given us more organs. — Malcolm Bradbury

You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes. — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — 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. — Malcolm Bradbury

Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic modality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel? — Malcolm Bradbury

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. — Malcolm Bradbury

Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are. — Malcolm Bradbury

Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one. — Malcolm Bradbury