E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM CHwas an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect ... ". His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to Indiabrought him his greatest success. He was...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 January 1879
E. M. Forster quotes about
There's never any great risk as long as you have money.
Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.
You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.
Sudden conversion ... is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind.
Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.
Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.
A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.
Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.
'Oh, poor, poor fellow!' said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.
Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.