Quote

But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

E. M. Forster

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Last
Unless
Explaining
Artist
Fight
Novelists
Cannot
Wants
Guide
Trivialities
Character
Learning
Guides
Triviality
Come
Seen
Obstacles
Haze
Needs
Alive
Remain
Dissolve
World
Fighting
Characters
Readiness
Lasts
Poetry
Novelist

More quotes by E. M. Forster

Image
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
Image
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
E. M. Forster
Image
This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
E. M. Forster
Image
For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
E. M. Forster
Image
Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.
E. M. Forster
Image
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. Forster
Image
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
E. M. Forster
Image
I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
E. M. Forster
Image
Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce boum.
E. M. Forster
Image
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E. M. Forster
Image
A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
E. M. Forster
Image
English literature is a flying fish.
E. M. Forster
Image
The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
E. M. Forster
Image
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
E. M. Forster
Image
Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others...
E. M. Forster
Image
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
Image
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
E. M. Forster
Image
Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.
E. M. Forster
Image
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
E. M. Forster
Image
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
E. M. Forster