Malcolm Bradbury quotes:

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions.

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code if immorality in the world.

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

Marriage is the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.

I've noticed your hostility towards him... I ought to have guessed you were friends.

Life is a crisis - so what!

Here we have a saying: a good friend is someone who visits you when you are in prison. But a really good friend is someone who comes to hear your lectures.

But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

Why is it that married people always say Come in when everything they do says Get out? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.

Marriage, [], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

..it lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The students could be, as it were (he said), the rubbing post for the thought of his teacher.

With my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. The problems aren't answered in the end because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world.

Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.

If God had meant us to have group sex, he'd have given us more organs.

Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.

On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.

The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they're old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they're too old and intelligent to want to.

The whole point of marriage is to stop you getting anywhere near real life. You think it's a great struggle with the mystery of being. It's more like being smothered in warm cocoa. There's sex, but it's not what you think. Marvellous, for the first fortnight. Then every Wednesday. If there isn't a good late-night concert on the Third. Meanwhile you become a biological functionary. An agent of the great female womb, spawning away, dumping its goods in your lap for succour. Daddy, daddy, we're here, and we're expensive.

To put it another way: a conference is an elite meeting on equal terms; a congress is a group of elites meeting on opposite terms; a convention is a mob meeting on equal terms; a course is an elite instructing a mob; and a colloquium is a group capable of considering all these phenomena.