Anthony Powell

A dance to the music of time.

— Anthony Powell

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

— Anthony Powell

Books do furnish a room.

— Anthony Powell

“A residuum of the experience was inevitable.”

— Anthony Powell

I get a warm feeling among my books.

— Anthony Powell

“Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.”

— Anthony Powell

“The crematorium was a blaze of sunshine.”

— Anthony Powell

You have to be a product of the product.

— Anthony Powell

“To those familiar with the rhythm of living there are few surprises in this world.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

“The army is at once the worst place for egoists, and the best.”

— Anthony Powell

“Even then I did not recognise the quest for power.”

— Anthony Powell

“Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them,' he used to say.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

“Like everything that's any good, it has about twenty different meanings.”

— Anthony Powell

“Everything alters, yet does remain the same. It might even improve matters.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

“Albert’s shutters may have kept out the suffragettes: they did not effectively exclude the Furies.”

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

“I know nothing of music,’ Barnby had, in turn, once remarked, ‘but Hugh Moreland’s accompaniment to that film sounded to me like…

— Anthony Powell

“In any case fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another. They cannot be…

— Anthony Powell

“The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.”

— Anthony Powell

“Aggressive activities against crayfish might be, by definition, excluded from an afternoon's programme devoted to Harmony. Who could tell?”

— Anthony Powell

“I felt little interest in possible danger of their being run over: only a great relief that the bus must in any…

— Anthony Powell

“What you say, Nick, strengthens my contention that only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition. Biography…

— Anthony Powell

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are…

— Anthony Powell

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts…

— Anthony Powell

“There was something decidedly unpleasant about him, sinister, at the same time absurd, that combination of the ludicrous and alarming soon to…

— Anthony Powell

“That morning was the last time I saw Moreland. It was also the last time I had, with anyone, the sort of…

— Anthony Powell

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled…

— Anthony Powell

“That illusion—as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear—was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out…

— Anthony Powell

“Her expression was oafish, but it was on the whole this quality that gave her face a certain retentive efficacy. She had…

— Anthony Powell

“The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two,…

— Anthony Powell

“...Even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though…

— Anthony Powell

“EACH RECRIMINATIVE DECADE POSES NEW riddles, how best to live, how best to write. One's fifties, in principle less acceptable than one's…

— Anthony Powell

“Soon after this meeting with the Morelands came the period of crisis leading up to the Abdication, one of those public events…

— Anthony Powell

“In its vulgar way, a painstaking piece of work, although one must always remember—something often forgotten today—that because things are generally known,…

— Anthony Powell

“Simple-lifers, Utopian socialists, spiritualists, occultists, theosophists, quietists, pacifists, futurists, cubists, zealots of all sorts in their approach to life and art, later…

— Anthony Powell

“   Susan poured herself out some more wine. She said: "You're nice. You must come and see me some time. I live miles…

— Anthony Powell

“Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used…

— Anthony Powell