Malcolm Bradbury famous quotes

03-26-2025

With sociology one can do anything and call it work
-- Malcolm Bradbury

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

#Suggestions #Ten Commandments
The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Lying #Deceit #Telling The Truth
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.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Father #Hate #Men
My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Discovery #Interesting #World
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.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Good Friend #Lectures #Prison
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.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Christian #Innocence #Sin
Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Reading #Sleep #Wife
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.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Children #Home #School
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.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Book #Way #Stealing
If God had meant us to have group sex, he'd have given us more organs.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Sex #Groups #Given
I like the English. They have the most rigid code if immorality in the world.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#World #Immorality #Code
To put it another way: a conference is an elite meeting on equal terms; a congress is a group of elites meeting on opposite terms; a convention is a mob meeting on equal terms; a course is an elite instructing a mob; and a colloquium is a group capable of considering all these phenomena.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Opposites #Way #Groups
Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#I Love You #Warfare #World
I've noticed your hostility towards him... I ought to have guessed you were friends.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Emotional #Hostility
Life is a crisis - so what!
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Problem #Life Is #Problem Solving
Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Details #Culture #World
Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Thinking #People #Bed
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Fate #People #World
Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Distraction #Scholarship
You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Home #Thinking #Sheep
On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.
-- Malcolm Bradbury

#Education #Space #Campus

You may also like:

Angela Carter
Novelist
Angus Wilson
Novelist
David Lodge
Author
Denis Diderot
Philosopher
Edward St Aubyn
Author
Graham Swift
Film writer
Ian Mcewan
Novelist
Jim Crace
Writer
John Banville
Novelist
John Schlesinger
Film director
Kazuo Ishiguro
Novelist
Kingsley Amis
Novelist
Margaret Drabble
Novelist
Martin Amis
Novelist
Patrick McCabe
Film writer
Rose Tremain
Author
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Novelist
Salman Rushdie
Novelist
Stella Gibbons
Author
Tom Sharpe
Novelist