Anthony Powell Quotations

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

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.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

A dance to the music of time.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said gruffly: 'I've got to go now.'