45 quotes
He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…
Daniel Martin (1977)
The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean - indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.
The Ebony Tower (1974)
I am infinitely strange to myself.
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour..
Daniel Martin (1977)
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all...
Daniel Martin (1977)
Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not numbers but know-how; this situation was apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented.
The Aristos (1964)
I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.
Daniel Martin (1977)
Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me...I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical...
Daniel Martin (1977)
Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.
Daniel Martin (1977)
Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians...
Daniel Martin (1977)
By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.
Daniel Martin (1977)
That's all. Just paint. That's my advice. Leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't.
The Ebony Tower (1974)
So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga...
Daniel Martin (1977)
Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?
Daniel Martin (1977)
I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.
Daniel Martin (1977)
The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his commitment to his ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly, Byronically, indifferent to their contemporary popularity.
The Aristos (1964)
"You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient."
"I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."
Daniel Martin (1977)
Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view...
Daniel Martin (1977)
The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice.
The Magus (1965)
The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles. He sees himself as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal.
The Aristos (1964)