Malcolm Bradbury Quotations

The whole point of marriage is to stop you getting anywhere near real life. You think it's a great struggle with the mystery of being. It's more like being smothered in warm cocoa. There's sex, but it's not what you think. Marvellous, for the first fortnight. Then every Wednesday. If there isn't a good late-night concert on the Third. Meanwhile you become a biological functionary. An agent of the great female womb, spawning away, dumping its goods in your lap for succour. Daddy, daddy, we're here, and we're expensive.

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.

You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

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.

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

Life is a crisis - so what!

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

Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code if immorality in the world.