Robertson Davies

“Fanaticism is ... compensation for doubt”

— Robertson Davies

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

— Robertson Davies

“You are like a fire: you warm me.”

— Robertson Davies

The ideal companion in bed is a good book.

— Robertson Davies

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

— Robertson Davies

Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.

— Robertson Davies

Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.

— Robertson Davies

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

— Robertson Davies

“If you cling frantically to the good, how are you to find out what the good really is?”

— Robertson Davies

Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.

— Robertson Davies

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

— Robertson Davies

“Of course some of us had some geography in school and had studied maps, but a school map is a terribly uncommunicative…

— Robertson Davies

It seemed to me as if the stones sang, in the strangest voices, in the language of Ultima Thule.

— Robertson Davies

A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.

— Robertson Davies

Women tell men things that men are not very likely to find out for themselves.

— Robertson Davies

Inactivity and deprivation of all accustomed stimulus is not rest; it is a preparation for the tomb

— Robertson Davies

Civilization rests on two things: the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and the voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it…

— Robertson Davies

“Are you New World or Old?' 'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.' 'Never read him.' 'Don't. But that was his question…

— Robertson Davies

“Wisdom may be rented...on the experience of other people, but we buy it at an inordinate price before we make it our…

— Robertson Davies

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building…

— Robertson Davies

Very often when I am introduced to women, I think, What is she really like behind the disguise which she wears? And…

— Robertson Davies

The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar...

— Robertson Davies

It used to be fashionable for authors to have their pictures taken with dogs, but the dogs always looked like models hired…

— Robertson Davies

Pessimism is a very easy way out when you're considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life…

— Robertson Davies

If I had to describe my remarks this evening frankly as if I were in police court and on oath, so to…

— Robertson Davies

“...people don't want to believe the truth about themselves. They get some mental picture of themselves and then they devil the poor…

— Robertson Davies

“...I managed to make it clear that what I most wanted was time to grow up. The war had not matured me;…

— Robertson Davies

One of the things that puzzles me is that so few people want to look at life as a totality and to…

— Robertson Davies

The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something…

— Robertson Davies

“Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in…

— Robertson Davies

Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to…

— Robertson Davies

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is…

— Robertson Davies

“I'll kill you all," yelled Bill, and swore for three or four minutes, calling us every dirty name he could think of…

— Robertson Davies

“But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little…

— Robertson Davies

The attributes of God have been carefully explored. But the Devil's attributes have been left vague. I think I've found one of…

— Robertson Davies

“Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under…

— Robertson Davies

Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there…

— Robertson Davies

“The older I grow the less Christ's teaching says to me. I am sometimes very conscious that I am following the path…

— Robertson Davies

“What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and…

— Robertson Davies

“In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to…

— Robertson Davies