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

Malcolm Bradbury Quotes

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

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

Reading

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

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

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

I like the English. They have the most rigid code if immorality in the world.

— Malcolm Bradbury

Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

— Malcolm Bradbury

Life is a crisis – so what!

— Malcolm Bradbury

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

— Malcolm Bradbury

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

— 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

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship.

— Malcolm Bradbury

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

— 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

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

One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it’s a question of one’s humanity.

— 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

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.

— Malcolm Bradbury

There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.

— Malcolm Bradbury

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.

— Malcolm Bradbury

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