But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

— Malcolm Bradbury

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

— Malcolm Bradbury

Greece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, and people who didn't; sometimes he preferred writers, and sometimes he preferred people.

— Malcolm Bradbury

Have a little sociological beans. As you said - in sociology one can do anything and call it work.

— Malcolm Bradbury

.it lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The students could be, as it were (he said), the rubbing post for the thought of his teacher.

— Malcolm Bradbury

Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.

— Malcolm Bradbury

Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.

— Malcolm Bradbury

Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?'' It's like having an operation,' said Greece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.

— Malcolm Bradbury

One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.

— Malcolm Bradbury

On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.

— Malcolm Bradbury