Will Compton Quotes

A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.

You are offered a piece of bread and butter that feels like a damp handkerchief and sometimes, when cucumber is added to it, like a wet one.

Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.

There are different kinds of wrong. The people sinned against are not always the best.

For me, one of the pleasures of cats company is their devotion to bodily comfort.

Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whiskey makes it go round twice as fast.

Science can have no quarrel with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are His children.

My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.

We can build upon foundations anywhere if they are well and firmly laid.

At your next breath each of you will probably inhale half a dozen or so of the molecules of Caesar’s last breath.

It is primarily through the growth of science and technology that man has acquired those attributes which distinguish him from the animals, which have indeed made it possible for him to become human.

Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Real life seems to have no plots.

I never know why self-sacrifice is noble. Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?

My first feeling about the paper and the attitude is that it is absurd.

Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.

Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,' said his cousin. 'But we seem to have no other.

A plot is like the bones of a person, not interesting like expression, or signs of experience, but the support of the whole.

I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domestic animal.

A person who can really be called an unselfish person, has no place in life.

Pushing forty? She's hanging on for dear life.

Every great discovery I ever made, I gambled that the truth was there, and then I acted in faith until I could prove its existence.

It's a great day for TWA.

If co-operation, is thus the lifeblood of science and technology, it is similarly vital to society as a whole.

Nobody who is not prepared to spoil cats will get from them the reward they are able to give to those who do spoil them.

At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.

The most original novelist now writing in English.

When I die, people will say it is the best thing for me. It is because they know it is the worst. They want to avoid the feeling of pity. As though they were the people most concerned!

Life in the twentieth century undeniably has ... such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams.

Beer does not taste like itself unless it is chasing a dram of neat whisky down the gullet - preferably two drams

People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.

There is danger in courage. Cowardice is a power for good. We hardly know what it prevents.

Twenty thousand years ago the family was the social unit. Now the social unit has become the world, in which it may truthfully be said that each person's welfare affects that of every other.

Dear, dear, the miniature world of the family! All the emotions of mankind seem to find a place in it.

I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.

There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.

There isn't much to say. I haven't been at all deedy.

I love just being passionate about something rather than just caring about the money or whos in the movie.

The question of engineering should be of interest not only to those of us who are engineers, but to the entire public which lives in an engineering world

People's weaker side is not necessarily their truer self.

It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.

To conquer fear, you must become fear.

it is in our minds that we live much of our life.

I think I feel on the whole that something's there trying to get out ... It's sort of trying to get out and wants help.

I'm able to live as an example of what I believe.

Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.

The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It's just a line to hang the washing on.