Christopher Isherwood Quotes

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

The reason why we are disenchanted with ourselves is because we entertain in the depths of our psyche a kind of vision-an anticipated vision of what we could be if we would be what we might be.

He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.

In some way they are all self-portraits, but I think I know what you mean by asking this - I would say, it is too idealistic to paint yourself.

If you agree with an outside person's interpretation of you, that's a happy bit of affirmation. It means you're communicating externally what you believe to be true internally. If you disagree, it helps clarify how you understand yourself. And maybe makes you productively question how to improve your communication skills.

You are who you are. I know you. You believe that? "Yea but--" "You're Eve Dallas. You're the love of my life. My heart and Soul. You're a cop, mind and bone. You're a woman of strength and resilience. Stubborn, hardheaded, occassionally mean as a badger, and more generous that you'll admit.

Of course.” She fluffed her hair. “I don’t want to brag, but I’m very high maintenance.” “Uh, I think low maintenance is what’s desirable.” “Low maintenance is what’s forgettable. You might want to write that down, underline it, circle it and put a star by it. It’s golden.” With barely a breath, she added, “Now let’s find out if we’re compatible, shall we?

I used to say I wanted to genuflect to a woman, put her up on a pedestal higher and higher, way up beyond my grasp...Then I'd find another one.

As a producer, it starts when I talk about privacy and silence. It starts before anybody believes in it. And I think that's, you have to have a real sense of self, and in order to push things through. And so often, what's interesting, is how many people dismiss an idea that eventually everybody [gloms] onto. So to me it's, that's what I mean by hard.

I spent so much time telling myself that this wasn't home that I started to believe it," she said carefully. "Belonging has always been tough for me." I can be your home," he said quietly. "Belong to me.

It's not terrible, people telling you you're great; what's terrible is when you start believing it.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

Nothing is real if you don't believe in who you are!

I think, for myself, life lied to me.

My success has allowed me to strike out with a higher class of women.

Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.

People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same." (Lena, 211)

For after years of living in a cage, a lion no longer even believes it is a lion . . . and a man no longer believes he is a man.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

I don't think I'm extremely intelligent by any means.

I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact.

By no means do I consider myself this great sparkling personality.

Believe that others are better than you in the debths of their soul, although outwardly you may appear better than they.

The old man, especially if he is in society in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.

So many believe that it is love that grows, but it is the knowing that grows and love simply expands to contain it.