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Someone has to ask you a question, George continues meaningly, before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested.

Christopher Isherwood

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Christopher Isherwood
Age: 81 †
Born: 1904
Born: August 26
Died: 1986
Died: January 4
Autobiographer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
County Palatine of Chester
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
Answers
Continues
Asks
Seldom
Anyone
George
Someone
Questions
Find
Answer
Right
Aren
Much
Interested
People
Question

More quotes by Christopher Isherwood

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By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
Christopher Isherwood
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I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.
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What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice the laws are still on the books.
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The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
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You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.
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Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.
Christopher Isherwood
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I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing.
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I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
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Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
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I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body - even this old beat-up carcass - that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!
Christopher Isherwood
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What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?
Christopher Isherwood
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Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.
Christopher Isherwood
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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. I don't know what I'm about.
Christopher Isherwood
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For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness. And ifsome part of the non—entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep water, then it will return to find itself homeless.
Christopher Isherwood
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We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
Christopher Isherwood
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But seriously, I believe I'm a sort of Ideal Woman, if you know what I mean. I'm the sort of woman who can take men away from their wives, but I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me and then he finds he doesn't really, after all.
Christopher Isherwood
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What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.
Christopher Isherwood
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Hollywood's two polar types are the cynically drunken writer aggressively nursing a ten-year-old reputation and the theatrically self-conscious hermit who strides the boulevard in sandals, home-made shorts and a prophetic beard, muttering against the Age of the Machines.
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I feel it's so easy to condemn this country [the United States] but they don't understand that this is where the mistakes are being made - and made first, so that we're going to get the answers first.
Christopher Isherwood
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Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.
Christopher Isherwood