E. M. Forster

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1879 age 0

   Born

2. 1970 age 91

   Died

3. 1984 age 91

   CreditA Passage to Indiascreenwriter

4. 1992 age 91

   CreditHowards Endscreenwriter

• AHAnthony Hopkins1 title
• HCHelena Bonham Carter1 title
• AGAlec Guinness1 title
• MMMargery Mason1 title
• ETEmma Thompson1 title
• MJMaurice Jarre1 title
• MCMichael Culver1 title
• RWRichard Wilson1 title
• DLDavid Lean1 title
• JBJohn Box1 title

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  Photo:Dora Carrington (1893–1932)Public domain

• If escapes the oblivion he so much dreaded, it will be neither as doctor nor as mathematician, but because, at the end of his life, he wrote a little book about himself, and wrote it in the right way. He had always been interested in the subject; and fragments of autobiography occur in most of his works. Now he gives it undivided attention, and endeavours, through fifty-four chapters, to describe his character, constitution, and fortunes. He might have been to us merely a person of some importance in his time—a funny old man who pottered about, four centuries ago, besides the springs of science. Hitherto his egotism has rescued him. He is so supremely interesting to himself, that he cannot but interest others; and his little book ranks among the great autobiographies of the world.

  E. M. Forster, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.

  E. M. Forster, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Sir, – Mr A. A. Milne's brilliant article deserves special thanks for its scathing analysis of 'the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli'. Our rulers knew that their policy would not be popular, and in the hope of stampeding us into it they permitted this vile appeal – the viler because the sentiment that it tries to pervert is a noble one and purifies the life of a nation when directed rightly. The bodies of the young men who are buried out there have no quarrel with one another now, no part in our quarrels or interest in our patronage, no craving for holocausts of more young men. Anyone who has himself entered, however feebly, into the life of the spirit, can realize this. It is only the elderly ghouls of Whitehall who exhume the dead for the purpose of party propaganda and employ them as a bait to catch the living... At the next election can we not provide them with a quiet retreat of their own? Its sanctity should be inviolable.

  E. M. Forster, CC BY-SA 4.0

• There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty — in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub — our immediate duty is to stop it.

  E. M. Forster, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I know very well how limited and how open to criticism, English freedom is. It is race-bound and it's class-bound. It means freedom for the Englishman, but not for the subject-races of his Empire. If you invite the average Englishman to share his liberties with the inhabitants of India or Kenya, he will reply, "Never," if he is a Tory, and "Not until I consider them worthy" if he is a Liberal.

  E. M. Forster, CC BY-SA 4.0

• As for my politics, you will have guessed that I am not a Fascist — Fascism does evil that evil may come. And I am not a Communist, though perhaps I might be one if I was a younger and braver man, for in Communism I see hope. It does many things which I think evil, but I know that it intends good. I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me — a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me. I do care about the past. I do care about the preservation and extension of freedom.

  E. M. Forster, CC BY-SA 4.0