Scoop quotes

View Quote A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it." Diary entry (March 1964), after hearing that doctors had removed a benign tumor from Randolph Churchill.

View Quote All day the head had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts. The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948) First lines

View Quote All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day. Vile Bodies (1930)

View Quote Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak. Reviewing World within World, the autobiography of Stephen Spender, in The Tablet (5 May 1951)

View Quote Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them. The Tablet (9 May 1951)

View Quote He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but; Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters - Dickens and Balzac even - were flagrantly guilty. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), page 122

View Quote His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death. As quoted in LIFE magazine (8 April 1946)

View Quote I put the words down and push them a bit. As quoted in his obituary in The New York Times (11 April 1966)

View Quote I put the words down and push them a bit.

View Quote I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

View Quote If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference. Clive James, in Glued to the Box (1983), p. 233

View Quote If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

View Quote If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside. Vile Bodies (1930)

View Quote In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

View Quote It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) First lines