Malcolm Bradbury Quotes

The post-war period has not been marked by a great aesthetic debate about the novel comparable to that of the earlier half of the century, in part because the role of the writer and critic divided, the writer going off to the marketplace and the critic to the university (which eventually turned out to be much the same thing).

The modern novel has been many things, and functioned at many levels. It would keep D.H. Lawrence poor, and make Jilly Cooper and Jeffrey Archer rich.

There were moments when Henry was glad he was a writer, for writers could live in their own minds and didn’t have to go out at all.

You probably know, 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.

Conversation is never easy for the British, who are never keen to express themselves to strangers or, for that matter, anyone, even themselves.

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.

In Slaka, sex is just politics with the clothes off.

The British have long had a taste for bad books, but they like them well written.

If God had meant us to have group sex, I guess he’d have given us all more organs.

‘We stay together, but we distrust each other.’ ‘Ah, yes,…but isn’t that a definition of marriage?’

They don’t spend themselves in relationships until they know what the odds are; long hours spent as babies lying in the rain outside greengrocers’ shops have made them tough.

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

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.

It had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity.