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Authors Christopher Isherwood

Carl Van Vechten

…Isherwood uses the materials of journalism to fashion what is always beyond the reach of journalism—an account of essential and representative current experience, felt as direct confrontation and emerging as literature.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Kenyon Review Isaac Rosenfeld The Kenyon Review 1946
I was walking with Mr. Isherwood on a Sunday walk—this was in Surrey—and Christopher said, “I think God must have been tired when He made this country.” That’s the first time I heard a remark that I thought was witty.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Paris Review W. H. Auden The Paris Review 1974

…I am forcibly reminded about the primacy of memoir for Isherwood. He could say like Tolstoy that hardly a character or event in his fiction was completely fabricated.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at Threepenny Review Thom Gunn Threepenny Review 1990
Portentousness, jargon, imprecision, and mannerism are widely accepted and imitated in literary criticism now—and Isherwood’s kind of transparency, since it clearly springs from a rigorous authorial control, is therefore to be considered authoritarian, thus reactionary, thus fascist.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at Threepenny Review Thom Gunn Threepenny Review 1990

A Meeting by the River

For a long time I’d wanted to write a confrontation story where the representative of something meets the representative of something else, and quite suddenly it came to me that this was the way to do it.

Read the full piece at The Paris Review Christopher Isherwood The Paris Review 1974
The World in the Evening

You know, I almost hate that book. I hate her, and her pathos, and her heart disease…

Read the full piece at The Paris Review Christopher Isherwood The Paris Review 1974