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William Thomas Beckford Quotes

I fear I shall never be...good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the Moon.

I fear I shall never be...good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the Moon.

William Thomas Beckford
Writing, Moon, Journey
Letter to Catherine, Lady Hamilton, April 1781; cited from "The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill" by Lewis Melville, London: William Heinemann, (p. 92), 1910.

[Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.

William Thomas Beckford
Fiction, Half, Literature

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