Quotes by Novelists - Page 58

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
W Somerset Maugham
True faith is unconditional.It is simply the reverence and aspiration towards a certain kind of spirit.Faith is not even the means of obtaining reward.Faith itself is the end.
Xue Mo
She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.
Anne Fortier
The more she was absolutely in need of external friendship, the more disposed was she to reject it, and to declare to herself that she was prepared to stand alone in the world.
Anthony Trollope
If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.
William H. Gass
If you ordered up a whore here, you'd probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?" His eyes lit up for a moment. "I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a whore and a Hershey bar?
Kage Baker
The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way - is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards an unknown goal! To act and think are opposites which identify one only in the Absolute. To accomplish all one's movements – of the head, the arms, the legs – without ever quite attaining the status of a puppet, but with a certainty that gives one a feeling of rightness: that is what is nowadays held up as the ideal. Be citizens of Universal activity! Forget to be conscious of ourselves! The blind horse gallops without hesitation, not knowing where it is going, not caring where it has been: so let up put out our eyes!
Rémy de Gourmont
Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of children.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.
Robert Graves
I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.
Philippa Gregory
Laughter is poison to fear.
George R.R. Martin
It is hard to fight with one's heart's desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.
Lawrence Durrell
An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.
Gaston Leroux
Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.
Carl Sandburg
sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love
Gabriel García Márquez
I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.
Joseph Conrad
She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down-keep down-slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted!
Ayn Rand
I don't care what kind of grades they give you at Delcroix. I wanted you to go there so you'd have a chance to learn how to use your gifts, and be confident enough to fight for what you believe in.
Inara Scott
Increased means and increased leisure are the two civi-lizers of man.
Benjamin Disraeli
Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.
William Dean Howells
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
Tim O'Brien
Americans can't stand any stranger looking them in the face. They take it as an insult. It's something they don't forgive. And every American carries a gun. If they catch you, a stranger, looking them in the face, they will shoot.
Okey Ndibe
It's as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.
Jackie Kay
The reason is obvious. You're my grandfather, okay. Like it or not, you're who you are and i'm who i am. And i'm here right now, so what are we going to do about it? -Adam Cayhall-
John Grisham
Chamara. What is the word that comes closest to it? Soo-Ja wondered. To stand it, to bear it, to grit your teeth and not cry out? To hold on, to wait until the worst is over? There is no other word for it, no way to translate it. It is not a word. It is a way to console yourself. He is not just telling her to stand the pain, but giving her comfort, the power to do so. Chamara is an incantation, and if she listens to its sound, she believes that she can do it, that she will push through this sadness. And if she is strong about it, she'll be rewarded in the end. It is a way of saying, I know, I feel it, too. This burns my heart, too.
Samuel Park
He stared dully at the desolate, cold road and the pale, dead night. Nothing was colder or more dead than his heart. He had loved an angel and now he despised a woman.
Gaston Leroux
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
John Fowles
Reason must know the heart's reasons and every other reason
Leonora Carrington
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.
Ayn Rand
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
C.P. Snow
England is never in a hurry because she is eternal.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
There are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been.
Anthony Trollope
The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
Ayn Rand
Illusions connected with religion are generally most difficult to remove.
John Meade Falkner
Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.
W Somerset Maugham
Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings.
Joseph Conrad
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
George Sand
The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.
Kamila Shamsie
For after all we make our faces as we go along...
May Sarton
What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there.
Malcolm Lowry
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
It's not evil, Rand. I know something evil when I smell it. This isn't evil, it's just incredibly stupid.
Robert Jordan
who says love is better than hate. i feel both gives equivalent pain.
shivangi lavaniya
The fire that burns against the cold.
George R.R. Martin
Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
Henry Fielding
Cutting honest throats by whispers.
Walter Scott
Today will die tomorrow.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.
Thomas Mann
How about this,' I said. 'We modify our plans with regard to ongoing facts as they become known to us, then remodify them as the situation unfolds. 'You mean make it all up as we go along?' asked Perkins.'Right.
Jasper Fforde
Love is the poetry of the senses!
Honoré de Balzac
The only person who worries about my mother is God, and that's only because she wants His job.
Sue Civil-Brown
Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
Arnold Bennett
Some centuries ago they had Raphael and Michael Angelo; now we have Mr. Paul Delaroche, and all because we are progre
Théophile Gautier
Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had love him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death. (Love in the Time of Cholera)
Gabriel García Márquez
The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother's delusions. Now, I don't know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother's delusions, and they're solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do---and watch this carefully please--is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.
Shirley Jackson
He who has lived and thought can't helpdespising people in his soul;him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days;for him there are no more enchantments;him does the snake of memories,him does repentance bite.
Alexander Pushkin
…and to all you other cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!
Gilbert Sorrentino
There is a crack in everything
Leonard Cohen
They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay
Dalton Trumbo