Malcolm Bradbury Quotes

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.

Here we have a saying: a good friend is someone who visits you when you are in prison. But a really good friend is someone who comes to hear your lectures.

If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

Life is a crisis - so what!

The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they're too old and intelligent to want to.

I've noticed your hostility towards him... I ought to have guessed you were friends.

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code if immorality in the world.

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.

Why is it that married people always say "Come in" when everything they do says "Get out"? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.

Well, it's really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us...and nothing.

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.

Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?''It's like having an operation, ' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work.

Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.

Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic modality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?

Have a little sociological beano. As you said - in sociology one can do anything and call it work.