Compton Burnett Quotes

Speaking of things robs them of half their terrors.

...poets generally write as if they were dead.

People do not like to lose their lives. That is the reason why they should not take other people's.

It is so subtle to write things that have no meaning

Well, the English have no family feelings. That is, none of the kind you mean. They have them, and one of them is that relations must cause no expense.

Everything is breaking stones, up to a point.

Things only ferment and fester in the dark.

As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against real life. But I think there are signs that strange things happen, though they do not emerge

The wrong is never the only thing a wrong-doer has done.

People don’t resent having nothing nearly as much as too little.

It was no doubt significant that Mary Beamish should have the novels of Miss Goudge while Piers had those of Miss Compton-Burnett,

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.

During those years his writers were Kerouac, Hesse and Camus. From among the living, Lowell, Moorcock, Ballard and Burroughs. Ballard had been to King’s, Cambridge but Roland forgave him that, as he would have forgiven him anything. He had a romantic view of writers. They should be, if not barefoot bums, light-footed, unrooted, free, living a vagabond life on the edge, gazing into the abyss and telling the world what was down there. Not knighthoods or pearls, for sure. Decades later he was more generous. Less stupid. A tweed jacket never stopped anyone from writing well. He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement. He deplored the way literary editors commissioned novelists rather than critics to review each other’s work. He thought it was a grisly spectacle, insecure writers condemning the fiction of their colleagues to make elbow room for themselves. His ignorant twenty-seven-year-old self would have sneered at Roland’s favourites now. He was reading through a domestic canon that lay just beyond the great encampments of literary modernism. Henry Green, Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton. Some had

There have been several intellectual lesbians of physical distinction: Collette, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles; and, in altogether another category, simple endearing prettiness, both Eleanor Clark and Katherine Anne Porter deserve their reputations. But Alice Lee Langman was a perfected presence, an enameled lady marked with the androgynous quality, that sexually ambivalent aura that seems a common denominator among certain persons whose allure crosses all frontiers--a mystique not confined to women, for Nureyev has it, Nehru had it, so did the youthful Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, so did Montgomery Clift and James Dean.

Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.

When we are told to look on the bright side of things, it is generally not at a happy time.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp: Zuleika Dobson Tiffany lamps Scopitone films The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA The Enquirer, headlines and stories Aubrey Beardsley drawings Swan Lake Bellini's operas Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards Schoedsack's King Kong the Cuban pop singer La Lupe Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man the old Flash Gordon comics women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.) the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett stag movies seen without lust

Poets generally write as if they were dead. –