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Quotes by Novelist
"Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right."
35
"And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?"
35
"In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better."
35
"No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid."
35
"The constellation she's named after tells the story of a princess, who was shackled to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster--punishment for her mother Casseopeia, who had bragged to Poseidon about her own beauty. Perseus, flying by, fell in love with Andromeda and saved her. In the sky, she's pictured with her arms outstretched and her hands chained."
35
"I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before."
35
"What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy's tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes."
35
"It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all."
35
"You are amazing," she said. "And you make a very handsome elephant."
35
"She decided to make his life as terrible, tragic and complicated as possible, so that some day Percy Jackson would have a really hard time writing about it."
35
"A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale."
35
"Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us."
35
"If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them."
35
"Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible."
35
"One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are."
35
"People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can't do."
35
"What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests."
35
"The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live."
35
"Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings."
35
"Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience."
35
"Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends."
35
"In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can."
35
"The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present."
35
"Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed."
35
"This is the average age of my Hunters, and all young maidens for whom I am patron, before they go astray.""Go astray?""Grow up. Become smitten with boys. Become silly, preoccupied, insecure."
35
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