Christopher Isherwood quotes

Christopher Isherwood was an English novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his works about Berlin in the early 20th century. His semi-autobiographical stories inspired the famous musical and film "Cabaret." He became a prominent figure in 20th-century literature and an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights. Here are 41 of his quotes:

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

Christopher Isherwood

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.

Christopher Isherwood

California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.

Christopher Isherwood

The past is just something that's over.

Christopher Isherwood

I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the people were. "Bill and Tony were constantly in and out. We went to La Jolla" - or something. I haven't the bluest idea who they were!

Christopher Isherwood

I feel it's so easy to condemn this country [the United States]; but they don't understand that this is where the mistakes are being made - and made first, so that we're going to get the answers first.

Christopher Isherwood

One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.

Christopher Isherwood

I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing.

Christopher Isherwood

The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

Christopher Isherwood

I must honor those who fight of their own free willl, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.

Christopher Isherwood

At one campus where I was lecturing, I asked a friend, "How many of my colleagues know I'm gay?" He answered, "All of them." I wasn't surprised. But, just the same, it was kind of spooky, because not one of them had ever given me the faintest sign that he or she knew. If I had spoken about it myself, most of them would have felt it was in bad taste.

Christopher Isherwood

You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

Christopher Isherwood

Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.

Christopher Isherwood

I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

Christopher Isherwood

I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.

Christopher Isherwood

We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.

Christopher Isherwood

If it's going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it's not a world that I want to live in.

Christopher Isherwood

George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.

Christopher Isherwood

I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body - even this old beat-up carcass - that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!

Christopher Isherwood

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

Christopher Isherwood

What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.

Christopher Isherwood

No one ever hates without a cause.

Christopher Isherwood