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Other authors named Robertson:
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Author's popularity: -2
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: 3
Vote: | A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed - and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Only a fool expects to be happy all the time. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don't know who I am and don't care. I sign "Jackie Collins" and they go away quite content. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The love of truth lies at the root of much humor. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery. |
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Biography
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Robertson Davies, CC (born August 28, 1913 at Thamesville, Ontario, and died December 2, 1995 at Orangeville, Ontario) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished men-of-letters.
Biography Early life
Growing up, Davies was surrounded by books and language. His father, Senator William Rupert Davies, was a newspaperman, and both his parents were voracious readers. He, in turn, read everything he could. He also participated in theatrical productions as a child, where he developed a lifelong interest in drama.
He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932 and then studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 1932 until 1935. At Queen's he was enrolled as a special student not working towards a degree. He left Canada to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLit degree in 1938. The next year he published his thesis, Shakespeare's Boy Actors, and embarked on an acting career outside London. In 1940 he played small roles and did literary work for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. Also that year Davies married Australian Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, and who was then working as stage manager for the theatre.
Davies' early life provided him with themes and material to which he would often return in his later work, including the theme of Canadians returning to England to finish their education, and the theatre.
Middle years
Davies and his new bride returned to Canada in 1940, where he took the position of literary editor at Saturday Night Magazine. Two years later, he became editor of the Peterborough Examiner in the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, northeast of Toronto. Again he was able to mine his experiences here for many of the characters and situations which later appeared in his novels and plays.
During his tenure as editor of the Examiner, which lasted from 1942 to 1955, and when he was publisher from 1955 to 1965, Davies published a total 18 books, produced several of his own plays and wrote articles for various journals.
For example, Davies set out his theory of acting in his Shakespeare for Young Players (1947) and then put theory into practice when he wrote Eros at Breakfast, a one-act play which was named best Canadian play of the year by the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival.
Eros at Breakfast was followed in close succession by Fortune, My Foe in 1949 and At My Heart's Core, a three-act play, in 1950. Meanwhile, Davies was writing humorous essays in the Examiner under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks. Some of these were collected and published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947), The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949), and later in Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967). (An omnibus edition of the three Marchbanks books, with new notes by the author, was published under the title The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks in 1985.)
Also during the 1950s, Davies played a major role in launching the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada. He served on the Festival's board of governors and collaborated with the Festival's director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, in publishing three books about the Festival's early years.
Although his first love was drama and he had achieved some success with his occasional humorous essays, Davies found greater success in fiction. His first three novels, which later became known as The Salterton Trilogy, were Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) (which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). These novels explored the difficulty of sustaining a cultural life in Canada, and life on a small-town newspaper, subjects of which Davies had first-hand knowledge.
The 1960s
In 1960 Davies joined Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he would teach literature until 1981. The following year he published a collection of essays on literature, A Voice From the Attic, and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary achievements.
In 1963 he became the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto's new graduate college. During his stint as Master, he initiated the tradition of writing and telling ghost stories at the yearly Christmas celebrations. His stories were later collected in his book High Spirits (1982).
The 1970s
Davies drew on his interest in Jungian psychology to create what was perhaps his greatest novel: Fifth Business (1970), a book that draws heavily on Davies' own experiences, his love of myth and magic and his knowledge of small-town mores. The narrator, like Davies, is of immigrant Canadian background, with a father who runs the town paper. The book's characters act in roles that roughly correspond to Jungian archetypes according to Davies' belief in the predominance of the spirit over the things of the world.
Davies built on the success of Fifth Business with two more novels: The Manticore (1972), a novel cast largely in the form of Jungian psychoanalysis (for which he received that year's Governor-General's Literary Award), and World of Wonders (1975). Together these three books came to be known as The Deptford Trilogy.
The 1980s and 1990s
When Davies retired from his position at the University, his seventh novel, a satire of academic life, The Rebel Angels (1981), was published, followed by What's Bred in the Bone (1985). These two books, along with his next one, became known as The Cornish Trilogy.
During his retirement he continued to write novels which further established him as a major figure in the literary world: The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) (the final installment in The Cornish Trilogy), Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994). He also realized a long-held dream when he penned the libretto to an opera: The Golden Ass, based on The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius. The opera was performed by the Canadian Opera Company at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, in April, 1999, several years after Davies' death.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Robertson Davies".
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