ANTHONY POWELL

Parents - especially step-parents - are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Books do furnish a room.

He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Actually, I think the Princess has no rights whatever. She was born a lady, came into the world in her right mind, ought to have known what was implied by marrying the heir to the throne, and accordingly put up with whatever befell her. In fact, duty.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

I get a warm feeling among my books.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

A dance to the music of time.

He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, literally, affect my purchase of rare vintages, and a figure of speech intended delicately to convey his own dire want for the bare necessities of life. He remained silent for several seconds, as if trying to make up his mind whether he could ever bring himself to speak to me again; and then said gruffly: 'I've got to go now.'

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.