He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said gruffly: 'I've got to go now.'

Anthony Powell

Categorized in : Mind Vintage Delicate Life

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

Anthony Powell

hard-work creative writing

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

Anthony Powell

nasty nice people

I get a warm feeling among my books.

Anthony Powell

warm feelings book

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

Anthony Powell

farce everyday life

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

Anthony Powell

disappointment children years

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

Anthony Powell

literature book

For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

Anthony Powell

events lasts taken

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Anthony Powell

significant people thinking

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.

Anthony Powell

literature book facts

Books do furnish a room.

Anthony Powell

reading book rooms

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.

Anthony Powell

answers writing ideas

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

Anthony Powell

passion faith love

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.

Anthony Powell

important knowing people

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.

Anthony Powell

creating hate air

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

Anthony Powell

innate tease misery

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.

Anthony Powell

biographies people thinking

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.

Anthony Powell

dexterity emotion hands

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

Anthony Powell

sat portraits process

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

Anthony Powell

understanding self giving

A dance to the music of time.

Anthony Powell

time