Christopher Isherwood Quotes

The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...

Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.

If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.

The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.

Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.

... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.

Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of?It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed.