Robertson Davies (1913–95,) fully William Robertson Davies, was a Canadian novelist and playwright, literary critic, and essayist. Widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s most brilliant and influential essayists and novelists, he is celebrated for writing penetrating observations on Canadian provincialism and prudery.
Born in Thamesville, Ontario, Davies was educated in Canada and at Balliol College, Oxford. A teacher, actor, and journalist, he was editor of his family’s newspaper, The Peterborough Examiner 1942–63. He became a professor of English at the University of Toronto 1960–81 and a writer of international repute.
Davies’s first novel was Tempest-Tost (1951,) the first of the Salterton trilogy. However, he is best known for the Deptford trilogy—Fifth Business (1970,) The Manticore (1972,) and World of Wonders (1975.) This work evolved from his earlier books set in the imaginary Ontario city of Salterton.
Davies’s Cornish trilogy, consisting of Rebel Angels (1981,) What’s Bred in the Bone (1985; shortlisted for a Booker,) and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988,) satirize the art world, grand opera, and other aspects of high culture. His subsequent works include the novels Murther & Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994,) and the nonfiction The Mirror of Nature (1983.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robertson Davies
A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Opera
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealised past.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Future, The Past
If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Love
Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Money
Whether you are really right or not doesn’t matter, it’s the belief that counts.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Commitment, Dedication
A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Being Ourselves
If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Books, Reading
It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity – the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension – can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion…
—Robertson Davies
Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Pornography
Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.
—Robertson Davies
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Censorship
He was a genius – that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Genius
The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Idleness
Very often when I am introduced to women, I think, What is she really like behind the disguise which she wears? And very often I discover that she is pleasant enough, and probably would expand and glow if she received enough affection.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Women
Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Genius
Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Vision
The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.
—Robertson Davies
The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.
—Robertson Davies
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Childhood
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Writers
He types his labored column—weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Journalism
The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so… That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.
—Robertson Davies
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Books
The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don’t know what they are conserving.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Fear, Conservatives
The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Education, Universities
What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Luck
Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don’t know who I am and don’t care. I sign “Jackie Collins” and they go away quite content.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Children
The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Truth
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Cats
You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Truth
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Happiness
Wisdom is a variable possession. Every man is wise when pursued by a mad dog, fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Wisdom
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Discovery, Perception, Thought, Vision, Understanding, The Mind
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
—Robertson Davies
Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Marriage, Wives
Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Quotations
Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life.
—Robertson Davies
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn’t, he should be ashamed of himself.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Criticism
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,” and then he passes the hat.
—Robertson Davies
Topics: Authors & Writing
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