Top 38 Malcolm Bradbury Quotes
#1. Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
Malcolm Bradbury
#2. 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
#3. I've noticed your hostility towards him ... I ought to have guessed you were friends.
Malcolm Bradbury
#4. 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
#5. If Caribbean writers have one single unifying theme, it is a strong sense of place, and of home. There is also - always, beneath the humour, which is a West Indian characteristic - a sadness: an awareness of a past that can never really be forgotten, or forgiven.
Malcolm Bradbury
#6. Marriage, [ ... ], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.
Malcolm Bradbury
#7. 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
#8. You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.
Malcolm Bradbury
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?
Malcolm Bradbury
#12. One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it's a question of one's humanity.
Malcolm Bradbury
#13. I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.
Malcolm Bradbury
#14. 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
#15. This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.
Malcolm Bradbury
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?'
'It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.
Malcolm Bradbury
#21. If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.
Malcolm Bradbury
#22. English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
Malcolm Bradbury
#23. 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
#24. There's always something or someone to do.'But don't you ever find it too much work, Howard?' asks Flora, 'All this dressing and undressing, all these undistinguished climaxes, all this chasing for more of the same, is it really, really, worth the effort?'Of course' [ ... ].
Malcolm Bradbury
#26. Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic modality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?
Malcolm Bradbury
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.
Malcolm Bradbury
#32. 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
#33. The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.
Malcolm Bradbury
#34. If God had meant us to have group sex, he'd have given us more organs.
Malcolm Bradbury
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
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