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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Think
Thinking
Till
Logic
Literature
Writing
More quotes by E. M. Forster
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something vulgarity, concealing something.
E. M. Forster
It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E. M. Forster
You talk as if a god had made the Machine, cried the other. I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.
E. M. Forster
I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
E. M. Forster
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. Forster
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. Forster
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. Forster
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
E. M. Forster
Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.
E. M. Forster
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. Forster
All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
E. M. Forster
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
E. M. Forster
A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
E. M. Forster
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
E. M. Forster
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
E. M. Forster
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
E. M. Forster
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. Forster
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
E. M. Forster
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
E. M. Forster
One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
E. M. Forster
