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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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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
Language
Writing
Humdrum
Observation
Quality
Poor

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I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.
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The sea only drowns its lovers.
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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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She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
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The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating of Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause.
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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.
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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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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.
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A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent.
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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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By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
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What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.
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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.
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Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.
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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.
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