Christopher Isherwood

These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their…

— Christopher Isherwood

The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

— Christopher Isherwood

By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.

— Christopher Isherwood

For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that;…

— Christopher Isherwood

In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. George will have to be George; the George they have named and will…

— Christopher Isherwood

“...a minority is only thought of as a minority if it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary.…

— Christopher Isherwood

“... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish…

— Christopher Isherwood

“I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets…

— Christopher Isherwood

The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of…

— Christopher Isherwood

George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.

— Christopher Isherwood

I feel it's so easy to condemn this country [the United States]; but they don't understand that this is where the mistakes…

— Christopher Isherwood

“Chalmers, like many of the English writers whom he then most admired, felt a strong natural sympathy with everything French. At Rouen…

— Christopher Isherwood

“No one ever hates without a cause....” Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man”

— Christopher Isherwood

“The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about life with which I do not agree.”

— Christopher Isherwood

“A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with…

— Christopher Isherwood

I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the…

— Christopher Isherwood

I seldom try to probe the mystery of my sloth. I have squandered a gigantic fortune of work hours... seems likely that…

— Christopher Isherwood

What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any…

— Christopher Isherwood

I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best…

— Christopher Isherwood

The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a…

— Christopher Isherwood

“I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about.”…

— Christopher Isherwood

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

— Christopher Isherwood

“...I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.”

— Christopher Isherwood

“Experience isn't any use. And yet, in quite another way, it might be. If only we weren't all such miserable fools and…

— Christopher Isherwood

“Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to…

— Christopher Isherwood