Quotes by Novelists - Page 36

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself one.
James A. Froude
Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature.
George Gissing
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to under stand that you life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever.
Steven Galloway
On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers’ hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar.
Gustave Flaubert
....With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.
Walker Percy
I am in the earth and the earth is in me
Luis Alberto Urrea
The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.
Thomas Mullen
Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love.
George R.R. Martin
Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
There are moments in life when all that we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us our wounds would wince at consoling words that would reveal the depths of our pain.
Honoré de Balzac
There is nothing in the world so difficult as that task of making up one's mind. Who is there that has not longed that the power and privilege of selection among alternatives should be taken away from him in some important crisis of his life, and that his conduct should be arranged for him, either this way or that, by some divine power if it were possible, - by some patriarchal power in the absence of divinity, - or by chance, even, if nothing better than chance could be found to do it? But no one dares to cast the die, and to go honestly by the hazard. There must be the actual necessity of obeying the die, before even the die can be of any use.
Anthony Trollope
I'll never be the size that has single digits and my thighs will always touch when I walk but I'm ok with that.
Sugar Jamison
A harp can be a dangerous as a sword, in the right hands.
George R.R. Martin
I was a coward. I went to the war.
Tim O'Brien
The Meadow... Only one of them succeeded in making a life here... He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.
James Galvin
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.
George Meredith
I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today . . . bullshit?
Anne Rice
I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.
Anne Rice
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
Learn to drink the cup of life as it comes.
Agnes Turnbull
Life is serious but art is fun!
John Irving
[Howard Roark] was asked for a statement, and he received a group of reporters in his office. He spoke without anger. He said:'I can't tell anyone anything about my building. If I prepared a hash of words to stuff into other people's brains, it would be an insult to them and to me. But I am glad you came here. I do have something to say. I want to ask every man who is interested in this to go and see the building, to look at it and then to use words of his own mind, if he cares to speak.'The Banner printed the interview as follows:'Mr. Roark, who seems to be a publicity hound, received reporters with an air of swaggering insolence and stated that the public mind was hash. He did not choose to talk, but seemed well aware of the advertising angles of the situation. All he cared about, he explained, was to have his building seen by as many people as possible.
Ayn Rand
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
John Irving
There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved.
George Sand
Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
What fire joins none man can put aside,
George R.R. Martin
The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.
Émile Zola
I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your brother
George R.R. Martin
Its regurgitation in newspapers of record and blogs of repute would be another reminder why the American society as a whole could never be call itself highbrow, why its easy availability of of stories on the private lives of others was turning adults, who would otherwise be enriching their minds with worthwhile knowledge, into juveniles who needed the satisfaction of knowing that others were more pathetic than them.
Imbolo Mbue
Be good sweet maid and let who can be clever.
Charles Kingsley
Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.
Thomas H. Cook
You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.
Anne Rice
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
John Fowles
She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
W Somerset Maugham
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.
Benjamin Disraeli
If you want to live your whole life free from pain,you must either be a god or a corpse.
Steve Berry
In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It is quite wrong to think of old age as a downward slope. On the contrary one climbs higher and higher with the advancing years and that too with surprising strides.
George Sand
Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.
John Fowles
Before you are much older...you will have policemen here to stay. A magistrate will be next. Then perhaps even a jail. And the counterparts of those things are hunger and want, and misery and idleness. The night is coming. Watch and pray.
Richard Llewellyn
Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".
David James Duncan
Three good men dead, to save a hedge knight's foot.
George R.R. Martin
Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen
José Saramago
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W Somerset Maugham
Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal
John Berger
There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.
Sue Monk Kidd
To think of losing is to lose already.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the "Rose of Fire.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the faces of a danger it is unable to comprehend.
Joseph Conrad
I wake in the night. Or sometimes I don't wake in the night. It hardly seems to make a difference.
Nicci French
Juliet by Ann Fortier. The Maestro (Chapter5) ... the slight nausea he was feeling must be somewhat near what God was feeling every minute of every day. If indeed He felt anything. He was, after all, a divine being, and it was entirely conceivable that divinity was incompatible with emotion. If not, then the Maestro sincerely pitied God, for the history of mankind was nothing more than a long tale of tears.
Anne Fortier
Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, "I've had enough of this.
Arnold Bennett
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is the example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.
Jasper Fforde
Charity must be voluntary.
Ayn Rand
Kindness is in a prison till it findsRelease in words or deeds.
William Kean Seymour
You know the people," said Pamela, "who say, 'Of course I love reading, but I've no time, alas!' as if everyone who loves reading doesn't make time.
O. Douglas