Quotes by Novelists - Page 92

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go to church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lot of humbugs who eat better than you or I do! Because he can be worshiped just as well in a wood, a field, or even just gazing at the ethereal vault, like the ancients.
Gustave Flaubert
Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak.
Ayn Rand
He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace
Mikhail Lermontov
A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.
John Irving
You are intelligent, you are diplomatic, you are beautiful, and you are and always will be...[he kisses her]...MINE...
Neil Jordan
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
Thomas Mann
To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
Witold Gombrowicz
Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty. I cannot say I despise you - for I am honest. You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. -
Thomas Mann
As soon as he was gone, we opened, "Baucis and Philemon." An elderly couple living in a cottage, they're granted a wish by Jove. They confer in private before Philemon asks, "May one hour take us both away; let neither outlive the other." The wish is granted. I said, "Simultaneous deaths? Why didn't they wish for eternal happiness instead? What else would anyone wish for?" "They did wish for that," answered Jamie.
David Guterson
She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.
Ayn Rand
i want to become as big as my dreams are...
shivangi lavaniya
Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
Tim O'Brien
Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.
Gabriel García Márquez
The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.
José Saramago
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It is possible,” said Miss Marling stiffly, “that Frederick and not Mary will have the ordering of thejourney.”Vidal chuckled. “Not if I know my Mary,” he replied
Georgette Heyer
You will like her," he persisted. "Egad, she's after your own heart, maman! She shot me in the arm.""Voyons, do you think that is what I like?
Georgette Heyer
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.
John Fowles
Winter, I wrote, was akin to living inside a refrigerator.
Okey Ndibe
People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.
John Fowles
Who is John Galt?
Ayn Rand
He'd had his career, his triumphs. Success had brought him nothing but misery; he couldn't handle it. Success had thrown him in the gutter
John Grisham
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
Tim O'Brien
[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary.
George Sand
If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relative to do the business.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Wahrscheinlich werde ich jede Nacht von dir träumen", sagte er. "Und wenn ich aufwache, weiß ich, dass der beste Teil des Tages schon vorbei ist.""Das hast du irgendwo gelesen.""Hab ich nicht.
Kai Meyer
Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]
George Sand
The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.
Gabriel García Márquez
Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.
Wilkie Collins
To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.
W Somerset Maugham
No singer would ever make a song about that battle. No maester would ever write down an account for one of the Reader's beloved books. No banners flew, no warhorns moaned, no great lord called his men about him to hear his final ringing words. They fought in the predawn gloom, shadow against shadow, stumbling over roots and rocks, with mud and rotting leaves beneath their feet.
George R.R. Martin
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
W Somerset Maugham
Always put your comfortable position on the horizon. Constantly seek to achieve it but also realize you can never reach there.
Shivam
You musn't talk of a young lady *belonging* to anybody, as if she was a piece of furniture, or money in the Three per Cent, or something of that sort.
Wilkie Collins
When I was very young I was disgracefully intolerant but when I passed the thirty mark I prided myself on having learned the beautiful lesson that all things were good and equally good. That however was really laziness. Now thank goodness I've sorted out what matters and what doesn't. And I'm beginning to be intolerant again.
G. B. Stern
Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a Liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County.
John Grisham
Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.
William Golding
Lasher,’ she said, ‘for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees.
Anne Rice
I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.
Mikhail Lermontov
The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
Edmund White
Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.
Rémy de Gourmont
One and all they are driven by the twin engines of ignorance and willful barbarism. You nod, you also are familiar with these two powerful components of our national character, ignorance and willful barbarianism. Yes, everywhere you turn, and even among the most gifted of us, the most extensively educated, these two brute forces of motivation will eventually emerge. The essential information is always missing; sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern. We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians.
John Hawkes
I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.
Witold Gombrowicz
Lord, thank you for the people who care more about me than about their schedules.
Shirley Corder
They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.
Kamila Shamsie
Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
Jean Rhys
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
John Fowles
Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
Ayn Rand
Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.
Henry Fielding
Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
Benjamin Disraeli
To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.
James Herbert
I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Sorrows of Werther William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) WERTHER had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter; Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter. Charlotte was a married lady, 5 And a moral man was Werther, And for all the wealth of Indies Would do nothing for to hurt her. So he sigh’d and pin’d and ogled, And his passion boil’d and bubbled, 10 Till he blew his silly brains out, And no more was by it troubled. Charlotte, having seen his body Borne before her on a shutter, Like a well-conducted person, 15 Went on cutting bread and butter.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There is noroom for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a privateego. Be empty in order to be filled. ’He that loveth his life shall lose it; andhe that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.
Ayn Rand
The work God carries out in us,' he said after a short pause, 'is not often what we expect. A great deal of the time the Holy Spirit seems to be working backward in us and wasting time. If a lump of iron could form an idea of the file that's slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet that's how God shapes us. Certain saints' lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate.
Georges Bernanos
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
Arnold Bennett
Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.
Sōseki Natsume
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough
Carlos Ruiz Zafón