Christina Stead
No rich man is a patriot, no rich man is a friend. They have all only got one fatherland the Ritz-Carlton; and one friend the mistress they're promising to divorce their wives for.Collection: Divorce
If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go around.Collection: Money
Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.Collection: Class
A woman is a hunter without a forest.Collection: Women
The waste, the insane freaks of these money men, the cynicism and egotism of their life... I'll show that they are not brilliant, not romantic, not delightful, not intelligent.Collection: Art
Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimisticCollection: Passion
Love is feared: it dissolves society, it's unpopular, and it's very rare.Collection: Fear
I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.Collection: Memories
Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.Collection: Glasses
Money has no country.Collection: Country
Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.Collection: Self
Intuition is not infallible; it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.Collection: Intuition
You want to be free and break new ground, speak your mind, fear no man, have the neighbours acknowledge that you're a good man; and at the same time you want to be a success, make money, join the country club, get the votes and kick the other man in the teeth and off the ladder.Collection: Success
About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.Collection: Art
Money is a jealous mistress If you want money you must want only money. ... I must tell you the one secret of life, there is only one: everything is a jealous mistress, everything is terribly possessive, and, by God, we want to be terribly possessed if we want to get somewhere - and we want to be terribly possessed - anyhow; or what is life?Collection: Money
A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.Collection: Success
It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.Collection: Creativity
The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.Collection: Struggle
Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.Collection: Men
A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.Collection: Believe
it's immoral to work to make money. There's something unlucky in it. You got to work for the work. You got to work on a farm, for the farm - then it makes money.Collection: Money
Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.Collection: Decision
The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.Collection: Men
money that is in billions and monopolies isn't money at all, because the people have none, and money is democratic, everyone has to have some or there's none at all.Collection: Money
A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.Collection: Mother
Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.Collection: Men
Pukka sahib or rank outsider--gentleman or bounder--and it's accent, accent, all the way.Collection: Gentleman
Men never believe a woman can do anything.Collection: Believe
Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.Collection: Clouds
Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual--masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.Collection: Drinking
Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.Collection: Real
And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!Collection: Dog
I hate Bernard Shaw because he says that life is compromise.Collection: Hate
The City is a machine miraculously organised for extracting gold from the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations, cottage hearth-stones, trees and rocks; and he, wretchedly waiting in the exterior halls, could not even get his finger on one tiny, tiny lever.Collection: Art
Strange is the influence of Marx on character.Collection: Character
Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.Collection: Story Writers
All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.Collection: Money
It was easy to see how upsetting it would be if women began to love freely where love came to them. An abyss would open in the principal shopping street of every town.Collection: Shopping
She was able to feel active creation going on around her in the rocks and hills, where the mystery of lust took place; and in herself, where all was yet only the night of senses and wild dreams, the work of passion going on.Collection: Love
I never wanted to marry anyone like my father; I always preferred those more shoddy.Collection: Father
Women are outside the law; they make nothing, they say yes or no to some collections of whereases.Collection: Law
Behind the concept of woman's strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.Collection: Ideas
It is most oppressive to be an aunt.Collection: Aunt
Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that.Collection: Life
If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.Collection: Law
It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.Collection: Men
I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!Collection: Men
A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.Collection: Future
All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.Collection: Men
Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to comeout first in the happy ending of moral uplift.Collection: Uplifting