Anthony Dymoke Powell

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Selflove seems so often unrequited.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

.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.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been . . . in the closest intimacy.

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

Growing old's like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.