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Christopher Isherwood

Literary Birthday – 26 August – Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood was born on 26 August 1904 and died on 4 January 1986.

Christopher Isherwood Quotes

  1. Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
  2. Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.
  3. We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
  4. The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
  5. A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realise that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.
  6. I’ll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who’s in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
  7. One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.

Christopher Isherwood was a British novelist, playwright, screenwriter, diarist, and autobiographer. Isherwood was enrolled at St. Edmund’s school, Hindhead, Surrey, beginning in 1914, where he met W. H. Auden, who became a life-long friend and colleague He was also homosexual and made this a theme of some of his writing. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin, a semi-autobiographical novel which was the basis for Cabaret; A Single Man, adapted into a film directed by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind, a memoir which carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement.

Source for Image: National Media Museum from UK, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons


by Amanda Patterson
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Posted on: 26th August 2013
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0 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 26 August – Christopher Isherwood”

  1. Vera

    Quote 5 isn’t by Christopher Isherwood. It was taken from the movie script of “A Single Man” but does not appear in the book (which by the way is not a first person narrative).
    I’d also venture the guess that his Berlin Stories are more famous than “A Single Man”.