top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!"
Standard
Customized
More
"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue..."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept, Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare, The shaft we raise to them and thee."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic."
Books
"Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem."
Talent
"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me."
Books
"But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels."
Time
"I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning."
Life
"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."
Writing
"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."
Books
"The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's."
Melancholy
"Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are."
Writer
"My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it."
Success
bottom of page