Laurence Housman Quotes

• Two more years were to go by before I knew anything about William Blake. Many years later, when his wife died, my godfather gave me the two books as a remembrance.

  Laurence Housman

• The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale.

  Laurence Housman

• The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted.

  Laurence Housman

• The man who bears my name, and who claims to be me, was born on July 15, 1865, the sixth in a family of seven. He was an ugly child, and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved.

  Laurence Housman

• That was luck: I should not then have been a conscientious objector; but I am quite sure that the abominations of war would have made me one, as soon as I got to the front.

  Laurence Housman

• Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.

  Laurence Housman

• Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released – to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

  Laurence Housman

• On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

  Laurence Housman

• My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

  Laurence Housman

• My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books – of poems – better than all mine put together.

  Laurence Housman

• My best chance is that, in a happy moment, I hit upon St Francis as the subject for a series of plays. Others might have written them better: but, as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine.

  Laurence Housman

• Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

  Laurence Housman

• It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.

  Laurence Housman

• It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion – death brought them into harmony.

  Laurence Housman

• It is right and natural that generous minds while in the twenties should think the books which try to reform the world’s wrong the greatest of all.

  Laurence Housman

• If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn’t write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy.

  Laurence Housman

• If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write.

  Laurence Housman

• I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

  Laurence Housman

• I still think that if the human race, or even one nation, could only get right about its God the rest would follow.

  Laurence Housman

• I shall not die young, for I am already near seventy: I may die old.

  Laurence Housman

Laurence Housman (25)

Birth:	18th July, 1865
Death:	20th February, 1959
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Playwriter, Writer

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