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Quotes by British Authors
"The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport."
"Whatever the opposite of regret is best describes how I've always felt about that decision - it opened me up to a million creative opportunities I needed to experience away from the bull and distorting mirrors that fame engenders."
"I feel like a hostage to fortune. Not that I am complaining. I wanted to play the role. But in truth I didn't think the show would be such a success. OK, I thought it would fail. Not because it was bad. I was confident it was good, but plenty of good things just sort of wither on the vine."
"Many years ago, I really didn't know where the next work was coming from."
"We believe the 36, nearly 40, billion pound discount given for a right to buy houses took a million houses out of the public housing sector which is desperately needed for rent."
"Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made."
"I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!"
"When do you know you're insane? And when do you known you're sane? I think I treat a fine line between the two. It's a battle to function, but somehow I manage."
"Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one."
"It is wiser to love who you are than what you want."
"It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them."
"I have never been attracted to any kind of violence."
"Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it."
"To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there."
"The disease is painless; it's the cure that hurts."
"To anyone who has started out on a long campaign believing that the gold medal was destined for him, the feeling when, all of a sudden, the medal has gone somewhere else is quite indescribable."
"It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]"
"Happiness is mental harmony; unhappiness is mental inharmony."
"Tolerance is another word for indifference."
"It is only from the people I've had the good fortune to meet that I am learning the lessons to guide me. Baz Luhrmann, director of 'Moulin Rouge,' for example, has a childlike curiosity about the world. He doesn't pretend to know all the answers - quite the opposite, in fact. He asks loads of questions of everyone."
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."
"You think too much of your "toilette", Adele; but you may have a flower." I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She sighed a sign of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress; there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress."
"It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality."
"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination."
"I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."
"We learn and experience ourselves only through suffering, everything else is humbug."
"The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people."
"For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination."
"Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?"
"Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.' That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked. One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered."
"Remembering is painful, it's difficult, but it can be inspiring and it can give wisdom."
"Be oblivious to city high-rises, work-related stress and microwave popcorn."
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