Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Novelists - Page 4
Explore popular quotes by famous novelists.
Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.
And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman's heart.
I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.
Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
I didn't really have a favourite subject at school as I was useless at everything.
The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.
The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.
It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not, it's a visa, and it runs out fast.
Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.
It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.
There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.
I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.
Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
The Arabs have a God, the Jews have another, and the Catholics have another! And they're all fighting to maintain that they worship the one real God. Idiots!
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.
Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.
Until you have lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
What isn't said is as important as what is said.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.
I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster.
I don't mind close-ups, I like them, but they're kind of forceful - you see a lot, you get a lot of information in a close-up. There's less mystery.
Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
'Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they're capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don't care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they've done wrong.
I just write books, and I do it without any notion of what I should do or shouldn't do.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
'Until Friday Night' is the first book in my new young adult series, 'The Field Party.'
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.