Anthony Powell famous quotes

06-16-2025

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

#Hard Work #Writing #Creative
I get a warm feeling among my books.
-- Anthony Powell

#Book #Feelings
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
-- Anthony Powell

#Book #Literature
It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
-- Anthony Powell

#Thinking #People #Significant
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.
-- Anthony Powell

#Book #Literature #Facts
Books do furnish a room.
-- Anthony Powell

#Book #Reading #Rooms
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.
-- Anthony Powell

#Nice #People #Nasty
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.
-- Anthony Powell

#Thinking #People #Biographies
Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.
-- Anthony Powell

#Children #Disappointment #Years
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.
-- Anthony Powell

#Hate #Creating #Air
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
-- Anthony Powell

#Knowing #People #Important
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
-- Anthony Powell

#Want #Pleasure #Given
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.
-- Anthony Powell

#Life #Everyday #Serious

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