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
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.