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

“It was [Hugh's] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and…

— Anthony Powell

“For lust of knowing what we should not know,’ he was fond of intoning, ‘we take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”

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

— Anthony Powell

“She could easily make matters more bizarre than embarrassing.”

— Anthony Powell

“though the matter of getting on well with young men in no circumstances presented serious difficulty to her.”

— 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

“Rusty wore jeans, Fiona a long skirt that swept the ground. Dragging its flounces across the damp grass, she looked like a…

— Anthony Powell

“That was when I began to suspect that being in love might be a complicated affair.”

— Anthony Powell

“Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers. I'd long…

— Anthony Powell

“I always enjoy this title—Cambises, King of Percia: a Lamentable Tragedy mixed full of Pleasant Mirth.’ ‘What's it like?’ ‘Not particularly exciting,…

— Anthony Powell

When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first…

— Anthony Powell

“My father will be filled with frank astonishment that I should be proving myself capable of earning a living in any capacity…

— Anthony Powell

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

— Anthony Powell

“A residuum of the experience was inevitable.”

— Anthony Powell

“One always finds the answer to everything in one’s own egotism.”

— Anthony Powell

“Most people's sex life is a mystery, especially that of individuals who seem to make most parade of it. Such is the…

— Anthony Powell

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be…

— Anthony Powell

“Youth, dumb with embarrassment, breathless with exhibitionism, stuttering with nerves, inarticulate with conceit; the socially flamboyant, the robustly brawny, the crudely uninstructed,…

— Anthony Powell

“It's no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,’ Moreland had once remarked.…

— Anthony Powell

“This is something of a paradox in that the transgression—crime perhaps—of America has been to reject Classicism for Romanticism. The national distaste…

— Anthony Powell

“In one room the carpet had been rolled back, and a hunchback wearing a velvet smoking-jacket was playing an accordion, writhing backwards…

— Anthony Powell

“My brother is a strange fellow," said Bernard, speaking with terrible bonhomie.”

— Anthony Powell

“The common where we had walked the previous evening was a deserted tract of land, typical of Surrey, looking as if it…

— Anthony Powell