Robertson Davies

Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.

No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.

Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.

We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure.

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.

Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.