'I cannot tell why I write as I do, as I do not know. I have even tried not to do it, but find myself falling back into my own way.'
'I do not think I have ever regarded myself as a professional writer. Even when I was quite young I always thought I would write. I had a lot of family troubles in my youth and then there was the 1914-18 war, and a very bad illness which prevented me from doing anything much.'
'I do not write slowly or destroy much, but I have long spaces in which I do not write at all. After I finish a book I feel that all the virtue has gone out of me.'
'It is better to start a book with the main line already prepared, but I cannot always do this. I have to start and hope for the best.'
'So it is true that comedy and tragedy are mingled.' said Adrian.
'Really it is all tragedy,' said his sister. 'Comedy is a wicked way of looking at it, when it is not our own'. -Mother and Son.
'Autobiography is not in my line and my life has to the outside eye been uneventful.'
'Without a moral standard there could be no civilised life.'
Asked if she accepted descriptions of her work as amoral:
'Not exactly. I shouldn't mind being described as amoral, but I don't think guilty people meet punishment in life. I think it is a literary convention. I think the evidence tends to show that crime on the whole pays.'
'I believe that it would go ill with many of us, if we were faced by a strong temptation, and I suspect that with some of us it does go ill.'
Ivy Compton -Burnett - what she thought of Virginia Woolf and her novels
Ivy Compton -Burnett - a list of her novels.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - -a typical novel.