Malcolm Bradbury Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Have a little sociological beano. As you said - in sociology one can do anything and call it work.

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.

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

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.

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

..it 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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.