Anthony Powell Quotes

Anthony Powell writes sharp, witty musings on truth, self-love, and the quirks of aging that feel like a candid conversation.

18 quotes

1. The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

2. Parents - especially step-parents - are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fufill the promise of their early years.

3. He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful.

4. Self-love seems so often unrequited.

5. Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

6. People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding.

7. He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.

8. I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

9. Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.

10. One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

11. Writing is above all a question of instinct.

12. Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

13. When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.

14. People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

15. There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

16. A dance to the music of time.

17. Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

18. [T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.