Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell CH CBEwas an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 December 1905
writing instinct
Writing is above all a question of instinct.
self giving understanding
Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.
products
You have to be a product of the product.
portraits process sat
Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
taken events lasts
For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected, so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.
hands dexterity emotion
Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.
food wine two
Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.
passion conceited sight
He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Selflove seems so often unrequited.
time
A dance to the music of time.
confidence love-yourself unrequited-love
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
misery tease greater
[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.
want pleasure given
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
thinking people biographies
People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
disappointment children years
Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.