40 quotes
He was short on the one attribute certain to meet the immediate respect of the rich — i.e. being rich — and must therefore obtrude deterrents against being buggered about.
I Want It Now (1968)
It had even occurred to him that sticking firmly to one girl could be unethically used to obtain exemption from the sometimes gruelling task of promiscuity.
You Can't Do Both (1994)
Be glad you're fifty — and
That you got there while things were nice,
In a world worth looking at twice.
So here's wishing you many more years,
But not all that many. Cheers!
Collected Poems, 1944-1979 (1979)
[W]hat's the point of growing a beard if you're not going to be a little bit free and easy?
You Can't Do Both (1994)
It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.
One Fat Englishman (1963)
[T]here was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
Lucky Jim (1954)
[I]t's human to choose any sort of path into the future rather than face the long road back to what you've left behind.
Girl, 20 (1971)
Life is mainly grief and labour.
Two things get you through.
Chortling when it hits your neighbour,
Whingeing when it's you.
[S]omething was being kept from him. But, short of scopolamine, hypnosis or wild horses, he knew he would never hear from her what it was.
Ending Up (1974)
Should you revisit us
Stay a little longer
And get to know the place...
On local life we trust
The resident witness
Not the royal tourist.
A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967 (1968)
You can't screw the rich, something in Ronnie muttered as Miss Quick got off him with quite as much alacrity as she had got on him. You have to let them screw you. Or else you leave out screwing altogether.
I Want It Now (1968)
As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution.
Ending Up (1974)
Internally, in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can be said about it. Like sex. But the effects it has on the world outside it can be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use.
Stanley and the Women (1984)
Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped up with deprivation, Jim. You fit the formula all right, and what's more you want to go on fitting it.
Lucky Jim (1954)
You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish […]. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes.
The Russian Girl (1992)
[W]e're all trapped in a sort of conspiracy to pretend everybody's forgiven everybody else and nobody minds anything any more and we all know life's not like that but what can we do?
The Biographer's Moustache (1995)
I told myself that I could soon start to relish the state of being alone […], only to find as usual that I was stuck with myself.[…] Two's company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one's a crowd.
The Green Man (1969)
'What's that stuff they put in ships to keep them from going all over the place?'
'What? Oh … ballast?'
'That's right. People's sex drives are like ballast, they keep them steady. It sounds wrong, but they do.'
Jake's Thing (1978)
'Do you think that's altogether fair to him, to Jimmie, that is? I realize you've known him longer than I have.'
'Maybe, maybe not. You know, darling, I think you're sometimes a bit carried away by fairness.'
The Biographer's Moustache (1995)
Jimmie had said more than once that the upper class enjoyed the true freedom of not caring what anybody else thought about them. Like children perhaps. If that had a bearing, there might be a connection with the boyishness of such people noted by some outside observers, including Indians under the British Raj and later.
The Biographer's Moustache (1995)