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Quotes by British Authors

"Disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible."

"All the wealth in the world is nothing, pointless - of no true value - if you yourself feel worthless."

"It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine."

"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."

"I've been told, by various people, that I think too much. This is incorrect! The truth is that I deliberately challenge people to think more than they would like to."

"The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil."

"I've never had a penny through oil deals and no one has produced a shred of evidence that I have."

"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane."


"All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!"

"When you only focus on your goals you never see any obstacles."

"She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her. I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave."

"Money!It's all about money!It's all it ever is these days!"

"Better a false belief than no belief at all."

"It really should be a criminal offense for an electrician to mount a breaker box on a bedroom wall. Unfortunately, I see the solar industry mounting inverters on bedroom walls also!"

"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."

"Now your boat comes in every day with Cosmic Ordering."

"If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush."

"I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do."

"Nature or nurture? A talent needs both."


"I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists."

"Heart language is logic set on fire."

"Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts."

"Having a set, popular formula does inhibit you."


"It has been rumoured that I was the brains of the robbery, but that was totally incorrect. I've been described as the tea boy, which is also incorrect."

"I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words. Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics."

"I would recommend that anyone who wants to do comedy on TV to do radio first."

"It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime."

"I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' --or else not."

"I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year."

"After all we did for Britain, selling that corduroy and making it swing, all we got was a bit of tin on a piece of leather."

"It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities."
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