Brigid Brophy
Brigid Brophy
Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Leveywas a British novelist, critic and campaigner for social reforms, including the rights of authors and animal rights. Among her novels was Hackenfeller's Ape; among her critical studies were Mozart the Dramatistand Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction ... In Praise Of Ronald Firbank. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of 1960s symptoms."...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 June 1929
sex two mind
To my mind, the two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the eighteenth century.
sacrifice animal monkeys
The fact that there are bigger injustices and wrongs doesn't make it right to sacrifice an innocent monkey. It doesn't alter the case at all.
life death pain
I don't myself believe that, even when we fulfill our minimum obligations not to cause pain, we have the right to kill animals. I know I would not have the right to kill you, however painlessly, just because I liked your flavour, and I am not in a position to judge that your life is worth more to you than the animal's to it.
bulls fighter tendencies
The bull-fighter has merely demonstrated that he is a butcher with balletic tendencies.
equality animal should-have
To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.
compassion people abuse
"Sentimentalist" is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse that to be cruel, which it isn't.
book fall age
By the age of three ... I was already an addicted reader. I still crave daily immersion in experience other than my own; (it needn't be more pleasant, exciting or illuminating -- merely other) and I still fall into books as though into catalepsy.
tongue should right-words
We Irish had the right word on the tip of our tongue, but the imperialist got at that. What should trip off it we trip over.
want guilty form
The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty?
art play doe
In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.
art strong nice
The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.
sex believe men
I refuse absolutely to consign the whole male sex to the nursery. ... I obdurately insist on believing that some men are my equals.
fun butterfly may
The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not taking others'.
animal sheep personality
To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti.