E. M. Forster (1879–1970,) fully Edward Morgan Forster, was an influential British novelist, short story-writer, and literary critic. He is best known for the novels A Room with a View (1908) and A Passage to India (1924.)
Born in London, Forster published Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905,) The Longest Journey (1907,) and A Room with a View (1908.) He hit literary success with his fourth novel, Howards End (1910,) which featured the class system in Edwardian England exposed through the lives of three families.
During a visit to India, Forster was inspired to write his masterpiece A Passage to India (1924,) about a young British schoolteacher who imagines being sexually assaulted by an Indian-Muslim doctor. She accuses him of attempted rape, but later retracts her charges. Considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, A Passage to India exposed the undercurrent of conflict and prejudice between the British and Indian cultures.
After publishing five novels before age 40, Forster never published any other novels during his lifetime. He subsequently wrote numerous short stories.
Forster wrote his sixth and last novel on the eve of the First World War and considered it among his best writing, but did not want it to be published in his lifetime because of its homosexual themes. Maurice (1971) was published posthumously to great renown.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: History
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Caution
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Beauty
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Books, Reading
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Faith, Belief
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Art
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Character
Lord I disbelieve—help thou my unbelief.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Doubt, Skepticism
Art for art’s sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden… it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Art, Artists
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
—E. M. Forster
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Purpose, Meaning
Failure and success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Luck, Success & Failure, Fate, Destiny
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Friendship, Trust
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
—E. M. Forster
Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Death, Dying
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Books, Reading
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Literature, Reading
We must be willing to let go of the life we have
planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
—E. M. Forster
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Praise
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Belief
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Education
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