Christopher Isherwood Quotes (1904-1986)

“It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.”

“I believe the Gita to be one of the major religious documents of the world. If its teachings did not seem to me to agree with those of the other gospels and scriptures, then my own system of values would be thrown into confusion, and I should feel completely bewildered. The Gita is not simply a sermon, but a philosophical treatise.”

“[May 17, 1939] Next day, we took a taxi into Hollywood. I was amazed at the size of the city, and at its lack of shape. There seemed no reason why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens, crowded with blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy, where neighbors share each other's lawns and look into each other's bedrooms. The whole place like a world's fair, quite new and already partly in ruins. The only permanent buildings are the schools and churches. On the hill, giant letters spell "Hollywoodland", but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is "unreal". But what the arriving traveler first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist.”

“It is a land of violence. Thunder and avalanches in the mountains, huge floods and storms on the plains. Volcanoes exploding. The earth shaking and splitting. The woods full of savage beasts and poisonous insects and deadly snakes. Knives are whipped out at a word. Whole families are murdered without any reason. Riots are sudden and bloody and often meaningless. Cars and trucks are driven into each other or over cliffs with an indifference which is half suicidal. Such an energy in destruction. Such an apathy when something has to be mended or built. So much honour in despair. So much weary fatalism toward poverty and disease. The shrug of the shoulders and the faint smile of cynicism. No good. Too late. It's gone. Finished. Broken. They're all dead. Ignore it. Use the other door. Sleep in another room. Throw it in the gutter. Tie the ends together with string. Put up a memorial cross. What is cooking in there, with such ominous sounds, nobody now alive will ever know. A new race and a new culture, certainly. Perhaps an entirely different kind of language. But whatever it may be, it is cooking. And it will go on doing so, mysteriously, noisily, furiously, through all the bad times that are coming.”

“Throughout his life Ramakrishna continued to use words and similes which struck his more sensitive hearers as shockingly crude. But even those who were shocked had to admit that in Ramakrishna's mouth, the words lost much of their offensiveness; for he used them with such innocence.”

“His light blue eyes behind his spectacles were like those of a baby who remembers his previous incarnation and is more amused than dismayed to find himself reborn in new surroundings. He had a baby's vulnerability, which is also the invulnerability of a creature whom one dare not harm.”

“I think Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy ever written in the English language.”

“Her genius was intensely feminine and personal—private almost. To read one of her books was (if you liked it) to receive a letter from her, addressed specially to you.”

“When a book is amusing and charming and quite easy to understand we are apt to dismiss it as a lightweight. Don't make this mistake about Laura Huxley. She offers you nothing less than a new life.”

“Robert Graves stands impressively, cantankerously, comically, nobly apart from his contemporaries. You can't even classify him as the leader of his own school. He hasn't one. Indeed, it may be said that he draws his greatest strength from wrestling single-handed with the brutish mob.”

“Novelists too — they practise the friendly unpatronising tone ; Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris changes Trains is an example of this. Isherwood — who is extremely intelligent — always writes as if the reader were equally intelligent. He is an example of democratic good manners. He trusts his public”

“Barriers dissolve, too, when confronted by the Eastern poems: the poems of the sacred books, in Yeats' translation of the Upanishads, or Isherwood's of the Bhagavad-Gita, and such work as E. Powys Mathers' Black Marigolds and Robert Payne's The White Pony, a rich anthology of Chinese poetry.”

“Christopher’s kind are homosexuals, but more importantly, minorities of any sort, either tortured obscenely by the Nazis or rejected more hypocritically by social convention and snobbism. In his matter-of-fact treatment of his sexual preferences and affairs ("To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys," he announces at the start), Isherwood has made an important contribution to the literature of minority liberation. … Our age, like the Thirties, is given to strident political and artistic positions; while it would be wrong to condemn the more active spokesmen of minority rights, it is all the more significant that the tone (that most ineffable of all literary qualities) of Isherwood’s autobiography is neither truculent nor confessional, but the still, honest voice of a man looking back on the events of a tumultuous time. He shows how all minorities can be persecuted, by laws (the notorious paragraph 175 of the German penal code which made homosexual acts illegal), in social condescension (even from sympathetic parties, like Christopher’s mother), and most grotesquely, in self-hatred. The book’s central episode (the midpoint of the book brings us to the mid-point of the decade) deals with Isherwood’s inability to get his German boyfriend out of Germany; at the last moment, victory is snatched away when Heinz is refused entry by a British immigration official at Harwich in 1934. Christopher and Auden have gone to the pier, and after Heinz is turned back, Auden chillingly notes of the official: "As soon as I saw the bright-eyed little rat, I knew we were done for. He understood the whole situation at a glance — because he’s one of us." Christopher and His Kind is a proclamation of the rights of "us," all of us, against the demands of "the others," whether fascists, aristocrats, war-makers, or the heterosexual hegemony, to live according to our natures.”