Anthony Powell People Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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