Quotes by Novelists - Page 13

You know you're writing a good thriller when you make yourself paranoid.

Shirley B. Garrett

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire.

James K. Morrow

A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.

Anne Rice

Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.

William Giraldi

When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.

George R.R. Martin

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

Oakley Hall

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

Honoré de Balzac

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

Ayn Rand

This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.

Indu Sundaresan

I have a plot, but not much happens.

Howard Nemerov

Look out how you use proud words.When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can’t hear you calling -Look out how you use proud words.

Carl Sandburg

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

I drink from a small spring, my thirst exceeds the ocean.

Adam Zagajewski

Excellence is inconveniently difficult.

William H. Gass

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down the fence.

Carl Sandburg

Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.

Walter Scott

I never truckled. I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.

Frank Norris

Unconditional love is the greatest gift of all" ~ The Soul Bearers, by Sylvia Massara

Sylvia Massara

From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

Georges Perec

Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

John dos Passos

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.

Jasper Fforde

Pain is a good cleanser of the mind and therefore of the sight. Matters which seem to mean the world, in health, are found to be of no import when pain is hard upon you.

Richard Llewellyn

I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

Thornton Wilder

Sometimes when one person is missing the whole world seems depopulated.

Alphonse de Lamartine

I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless life just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things..." He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I'd had hurt him somehow. "There is blessedness in that." I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.

Anne Rice

As a society, we adhere to the belief in a fair trial for a person accused of a serious crime, but some of us struggle when it comes to the business of providing a competent lawyer to guarantee said fair trial. Lawyers like me live with the question “But how do you represent such scum?”I offer a quick “Someone has to” as I walk away.Do we really want fair trials? No, we do not. We want justice, and quickly. And justice is whatever we deem it to be on a case-by-case basis.It’s just as well that we don’t believe in fair trials because we damned sure don’t have them. The presumption of innocence is now the presumption of guilt. The burden of proof is a travesty because the proof is often lies. Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt means if he probably did it, then let’s get him off the streets.

John Grisham

Strange that only a little problem of your own will take your mind far from a tragedy belonging to others.

Richard Llewellyn

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal

Cesare Pavese

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

Ayn Rand

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward inhibition; they do not see what they do not wish to see, what is useless to them, or disagreeable.

Rémy de Gourmont

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.

Edmund White

The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.

Honoré de Balzac

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

Gustave Flaubert

May the radiance of what you love, manifest in whatever you do.

Shilpa Menon

The world goes up and the world goes down And the sunshine follows the rain And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again Sweet wife. No never come over again.

Charles Kingsley

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.

Dezső Kosztolányi

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

Gustave Flaubert

PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done.And it's our job to stop them.

Jasper Fforde

The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.

Émile Zola

In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.

Anthony Powell

It's not," Mormont told him. "Gods save us, boy, you're not blind and you're not stupid. When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?

George R.R. Martin

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

John Irving

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Benjamin Disraeli

God promises to hear and answer our prayers, but he doesn't always answer the way we want him to.

Shirley Corder

THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY - IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON'T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD - THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL...THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOUR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US.

John Irving

Now, I'm not going to deny that I was aware of your beauty. But the point is, this has nothing to do with your beauty. As I got to know you, I began to realise that beauty was the least of your qualities. I became fascinated by your goodness. I was drawn in by it. I didn't understand what was happening to me. And it was only when I began to feel actual, physical pain every time you left the room that it finally dawned on me: I was in love, for the first time in my life. I knew it was hopeless, but that didn't matter to me. And it's not that I want to have you. All I want is to deserve you. Tell me what to do. Show me how to behave. I'll do anything you say.

Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos

The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.

Anne Rice

Maybe we do go home, finally.

Anne Rice

That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.

Aphra Behn

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

Joseph Conrad

Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.

Gabriel García Márquez

I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you’ll be better and healthier and you’ll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I’m supposed to like them. I’m supposed to want them. I don’t. Don’t like them, don’t want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I’m just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I’m hoping that maybe deep down inside I’m a coyote.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I used to measure myself against other people, but I always came up short. Now, I try to figure out what I really want, and measure myself against that.

Inara Scott

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?""I've felt it all my life," she said.

Ayn Rand

I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance

Alfred de Vigny

Recalling former years’ romances,Recalling love that time enhances,With tenderness, with not a care,Alive, at liberty once more,We drank, in mute intoxication,The breath of the indulgent night!Just as a sleepy convict mightBe carried from incarcerationInto a greenwood, so were weBorne to our youth by reverie.

Alexander Pushkin

Indian food is like classical music raga- it takes time to build up to a crescendo.

Shobhaa Dé

But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu...

W Somerset Maugham

...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.

Anne Rice

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