Simon Raven Quotations

Right ho, I'll marry you. That'll keep your family happy. But I won't live with you - ever.

Whereas the gentleman always seeks to deserve his position, the aristocrat, disdainful and insouciant, is quite happy just to exploit it.

I've always written for a small audience consisting of people like myself who are well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad). And who believe that nothing and nobody is special.

For in a literary career there was one unfailing advantage: No degree whatever of moral or social disgrace could disqualify one from practice - and indeed a bad character, if suitably tricked out for presentation, might win one helpful publicity.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

How can I go on with this? Please God, let me win a football pool.

Gentlemen can now only behave as such, or be tolerated as such, in circumstances that are manifestly contrived or unreal.

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

And so, at the age of thirty, I had successively disgraced myself with three fine institutions, each of which had made me free of its full and rich resources, had trained me with skill and patience, and had shown me nothing but forbearance and charity when I failed in trust.

I loved the Army as an institution and loathed every single thing it required me to do.

Christ asked for everything he got.

Art for art's sake, money for God's sake.

Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.

...dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun.

Since life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.

... life is short and the world is wide