Malcolm Bradbury Quotes

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

Life is a crisis - so what! ~ Malcolm Bradbury

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

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. ~ 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

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

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. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

T 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. ~ 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

I've noticed your hostility towards him ... I ought to have guessed you were friends. ~ 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

Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly. ~ William Golding

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

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. ~ 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 sociology one can do anything and call it work ~ Malcolm Bradbury

Maybe one reason so many people have so many problems is that there are so many other people with so many solutions." (Love on a Gunboat") ~ 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

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

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. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

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

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. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

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. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

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

After all, the function of a vacation is regenerative, not luxurious. It's to restore our equipment so that we can live our ordinary lives better. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

- we no longer live in the Age of Reason. We don't have reason we have computation. We don't have a tree of knowledge; we have an information superhighway. We don't have real intelligence; we have artificial intelligence. We no longer pursue truth, we seek data and signals. We no longer have philosophers, we have thinking pragmatists. We no longer have morals, we have lifestyles. We no longer have brains which serve as the seat of our thinking minds; we have neural sites, which remember, store body signals, control genes, generate dreams, anxieties and neuroses, quite independent of whether they think rationally or not. So starting from reason, where did we get? ~ Malcolm Bradbury

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. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

Marriage, [ ... ], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

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

I have a new way of doing things, and I don't care if you think I'm crazy. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself
dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes
were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact. ~ Ray Bradbury

I'd love to do radio plays. I think that one should be open to everything and shouldn't limit oneself. ~ Malcolm McDowell

Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn't go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son. ~ Ray Bradbury

If they had not murdered Malcolm X, there probably never would have been a Black Panther Party. ~ Bobby Seale

Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Later in the morning Saul tried to die. ~ Ray Bradbury

[Chris Langan] told me not long ago. "I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Who has a house for ten years and doesn't own a drill? - Kerry

A gay man who has the phone number of a really hot carpenter. - Malcolm ~ Jaime Samms

Being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience ~ Malcolm Gladwell

What Wolf began to realize was that ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading. ~ Ray Bradbury

Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference. It means if you want to know whether-and what-kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren't learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren't watching. Preschoolers are so sophisticated in their viewing behavior that you can determine the stickiness of children's programming by simple observation. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques. ~ Kim Harrison

He trusts Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn't want trust: he wants someone to show the silvery, stripey marble he's found from a small quarry outside Izmir and argue about how much of it is too much; and to make smell the cypress from Gifu that he's sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the objects - hammers; wrenches; pliers - he's embedded like trilobites in the poured concrete floors. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Big government is the most corrupt industry in America. ~ Malcolm Wallop

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'Do you hate me?' The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate! Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I'm snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching? ~ Malcolm X

You'll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted into Miss Columbias, eagles plucked raw on the backs of quarters, all run to quicksilver in your jeans. More! Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord's Prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! A box-Brownie photo, by God, of that fire climbing down the sky to blow you like a penny whistle, suck your soul back up along the bright stair! ~ Ray Bradbury

I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

How do you teach "work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money" to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That's why so many cultures around the world have a proverb to describe the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of wealth. In English, the saying is "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." The Italians say, "Dalle stelle alle stalle" ("from stars to stables"). In Spain it's "Quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien no lo tiene, lo deshance" ("he who doesn't have it, does it, and he who has it, misuses it"). Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

This is happening to me," said Montag.
"What a dreadful surprise," said Beatty. "For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely
is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no
consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are. But let's not talk about
them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up with you, it's too late, isn't it,
Montag? ~ Ray Bradbury

WHO TAUGHT YOU TO HATE THE TEXTURE OF YOUR HAIR?
WHO TAUGHT YOU TO HATE THE COLOUR OF YOUR SKIN? ... ~ Malcolm X

He listened to the hooting of many metal horns, squealing of brakes, the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges in their stalls. Colonel Freeleigh's feet began to move, hanging from the edge of his wheel chair, making the motions of a man walking. His eyes squeezed tight. He gave a series of immense sniffs, as if to gain the odors of meats hung on iron hooks in sunshine, cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins; the smell of stone alleys wet with morning rain. He could feel the sun bum his spiny-bearded cheek, and he was twenty-five years old again, walking, walking, looking, smiling, happy to be alive, very much alert, drinking in colors and smells. ~ Ray Bradbury

There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets
these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. ~ Janet Malcolm

No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers, and sweet autumns. ~ Ray Bradbury

There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. [...] The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters ~ Malcolm Gladwell

School busses ... Won't even give us a chance to be late for school ... Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare,Doug, just think it all over. ~ Ray Bradbury

Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard? ... I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly ... If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He'd say, that's grass! A pink blur! That's a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. ~ Ray Bradbury

At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Death makes everything else sad. But death itself only scares. If there wasn't death, all the other things wouldn't get tainted. ~ Ray Bradbury

So basically
be careful never to be too awesome
or you will be mysteriously executed
just like Martin Luther King
and Gandhi
and Abraham Lincoln
and JFK
and Malcolm X
and Sitting Bull
and Crazy Horse
and... wow
why are we so mean to our best people? ~ Cory O'Brien