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Quotes by Novelist
"There's this sense of excitement because you invent and control the characters. You decide whether they live or die. I find this type of creative process tremendously stimulating."
61
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
61
"To despise riches, may, indeed, be philosophic, but to dispense them worthily, must surely be more beneficial to mankind."
61
"The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume."
61
"Anger ventilated often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge."
61
"I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels."
61
"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
61
"A chaplain's biggest gift is to be present and just listen."
61
"We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look."
61
"Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity."
61
"I think a servant of the enemy would look fairer and feel fouler."
61
"Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body."
61
"The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her."
61
"Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them."
61
"Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face."
61
"Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers."
61
"When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg."
60
"I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years."
60
"Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults."
60
"If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic."
60
"Grover wore his fake feet and his pants to pass as human. He wore a green rasta-style cap, because when it rained his curly hair flattened and you could just see the tips of his horns. His bright orange backpack was full of scrap metal and apples to snack on. In his pocket was a set of reed pipes his daddy goat had carved for him, even though he only knew two songs: Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 12 and Hilary Duff's "So Yesterday," both of which sounded pretty bad on reed pipes."
60
"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"
60
"This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt."
60
"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
60
"Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town."
60
"There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice."
60
"The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity."
60
"But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands."
60
"Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe."
60
"How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski."
60
"It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine."
60
"Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old."
60
"The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives."
60
"I've known him a long time. I admire him. Hell, I might even love him. He helped me when-well, he helped me, and I owe him. He never lies, never plays games. He always says what he means and means what he says. And he has made it clear you're off-limits."
60
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