21 quotes
He might, in certain situations, accept them as allies but he could never regard them as comrades.
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
Once I have refused to press that button because of Heinz, I can never press it.
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
Exhumations (1966)
'We don't think enough [about the lot] of the other fellow, and that's a fact.'
Prater Violet (1945)
The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism.
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
Berlin Diary (1930)
Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.
Great English Short Stories (1957)
As a homosexual, he had been wavering between embarrassment and defiance.
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
The only difference was that the Nazis called it "sexual Bolshevism" and the Communists "Fascist perversion."
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
I must honor those who fight of their own free willl, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
The Paris Review interview (1973)
Christopher, like many other writers, was shockingly ignorant of the objective world, except where it touched his own experience. When he had to hide his ignorance beneath a veneer, he simply consulted someone who could supply him with the information he needed.
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate — the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters.
Christopher would find himself able to believe — as a possibility, at least — that an eternal impersonal presence (call it "the soul" if you like) exists within all creatures and is other than the mutable non-eternal "person."
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
It seems to me that the real clue to your sex orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than in your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy having sex with him.
There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.
Exhumations (1966)
I believe the Gita to be one of the major religious documents of the world. If its teachings did not seem to me to agree with those of the other gospels and scriptures, then my own system of values would be thrown into confusion, and I should feel completely bewildered. The Gita is not simply a sermon, but a philosophical treatise.
California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations — the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories — followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.
Exhumations (1966)
According to Christopher’s diary
Christopher and His Kind (1976)