Quotes by Novelists - Page 33

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.
John Irving
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
Honoré de Balzac
There's more to good or bad than what's written in the Rulebook.
Jasper Fforde
It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.
Walter de la Mare
Power is a trick. It lies where we believe it lies.
George R.R. Martin
A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.
Sinclair Lewis
I'm so lucky to have a family, adopted or not! I'm so lucky to be alive!" Judy Ellis Taylor tells her three school-age girls.... They roll their eyes.
Shireen Jeejeebhoy
And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars.
Anne Rice
Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.
Anthony Trollope
Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.
Jasper Fforde
Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.
Leonora Carrington
Cancer is finite. God is way bigger.
Shirley Corder
The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favors the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies.Be good. Play by our rules. Don't cause a disturbance.
Thomas King
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
John Berger
Señor d.‘Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?”“Just exactly what it deserves.”“Oh, how cruel!”“Don’t you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?” Francisco asked gravely. “I do.
Ayn Rand
He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto--or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it, nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
Ayn Rand
Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of thesinful.
Paul Bourget
I said, 'Yes theres a lot to look a head to. Like croaking iron at Widders Dump. We do the croaking and they get the iron.'He said, 'Riddley theres other things to do as wel.'I said, 'Yes and they all smel of cow shit dont they?
Russell Hoban
How do you eat your roots?
Kamila Shamsie
I have the happiness of the passing moment and what more can mortal ask?
George R. Gissing
To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.
Lawrence Hill
Any cat may stare into a fire and see red mice play,
George R.R. Martin
She is not truly beautiful but something about her draws the eye.
George R.R. Martin
The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
David Guterson
An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.
Romain Gary
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.
Anthony Powell
There is a crack in everything.That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
Guy de Maupassant
If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be pat
Hilary Mantel
We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon
Frederic Manning
Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.
Honoré de Balzac
That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.
Edna Ferber
Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.
William Makepeace Thackeray
It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
Kim Stanley Robinson
We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.
George Sand
They are a couple in love, and anyone but a fool would see it is simply that, nothing more- and certainly nothing less.
Philippa Gregory
My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.
Stevie Smith
She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.
Gabriel García Márquez
Inspiration comes when you stick your elbows on the table, your bottom on the chair and you start sweating. Choose a theme, an idea, and squeeze your brain until it hurts. That's called inspiration.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is the place of response, of unifying one's heart, mind, soul and feet around a decision.
Sue Monk Kidd
At eight-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
Gabriel García Márquez
As for what you're calling hard luck - well we made New England out of it. That and codfish.
Stephen Vincent Benét
Most people ignore most poetry because poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
Ayn Rand
Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.
Émile Gaboriau
The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.
Wilkie Collins
The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can’t look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can’t find proofs of the crawl toward perfection that she believed in. Maybe what we call evil is only as she told me that first day we met, what conflicts with our interests; but maybe there are such realities as ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, malice, criminal carelessness, and maybe these things are evil no mater whose interests they serve or conflict with.
Wallace Stegner
Truth is a rough honest helter-skelter terrier that none like to see brought into their drawing rooms.
Ouida
It is difficult to make a reputation, but is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made --- so faithful is the public.
Arnold Bennett
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.
George Santayana
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
Thomas Mann
...were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man’s foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels...
Ayn Rand
To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
Ayn Rand
To succeed is nothing-it's an accident. But to feel no doubts about oneself is something very different: it is character.
Marie Leneru
It’s so unrewarding, being a woman.
Sōseki Natsume
This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keepsuch a secret?' My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and itssorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Personally I don’t endorse the notion of mortality. It’s fine for other folk, but I disapprove of the concept for me and my loved ones. Seems unfair that we’re not allowed to vote on the matter and not one of us is excused. Who made up that rule?" - Kinsey Millhone
Sue Grafton