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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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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
Read
Doesn
Book
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More quotes by Christopher Isherwood

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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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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.
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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Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.
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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You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.
Christopher Isherwood
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She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Christopher Isherwood
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I seldom try to probe the mystery of my sloth. I have squandered a gigantic fortune of work hours... seems likely that I'll go on squandering till the very end.
Christopher Isherwood
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The town is an advertisement for itself none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
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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Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.
Christopher Isherwood
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I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.
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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I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
Christopher Isherwood
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Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
Christopher Isherwood
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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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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
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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.
Christopher Isherwood
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Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.
Christopher Isherwood
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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