What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to wha...t? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial gam...es could be played.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. I...t accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of ima...ginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we were doing this in the Falklands they would love it. It's part of our heritage. The British have always been fighting wars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But among all our Methods of moving Pity or Terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous, and what more exposes us to the Contemp...t and Ridicule of our Neighbours, than that dreadful butchering of one another, which is so very frequent upon the English Stage. To delight in seeing Men stabbed, poisoned, racked, or impaled, is certainly the Sign of a cruel Temper: And as this is often practised before the British Audience, several French Criticks, who think these are grateful Spectacles to us, take Occasion from them to represent us a People that delight in Blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If this creature is a murderer, then so are we all. This snake has killed one British soldier; we have killed many. This is not mu...rder, gentlemen. This is war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing mu...ch the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of a British man's constitution. His thoughts and beauties ar...e so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.--No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »