Literary Birthday – 21 December – Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell was born on 21 December 1905 and died on 28 March 2000.

Anthony Powell Quotes

1. Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
2. 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.
3. Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.
4. Books do furnish a room.
5. Growing old is like being increasingly penalised for a crime you haven’t committed.
6. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
7. The latter’s boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.
8. Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
9. Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
10. I get a warm feeling among my books.

Anthony Powell was an English novelist. He is best known for his autobiographic and satiric twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. It is on the list of longest novels in English. Powell continued to write novels and also four volumes of memoirs, collected as To Keep the Ball Rolling. In addition to his creative writing, Powell served as the primary fiction reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. He served as literary editor of Punch from 1953 to 1959. His work has remained in print and been the subject of TV and radio dramatizations.

Source for Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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