top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
65
"Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings."
64
"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good."
63
"In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner."
62
"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
62
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
62
"When a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive."
61
"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."
61
"If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow."
60
"I think all writing is done through memory."
59
"But everything of value about me is in my books."
59
"To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession."
58
"That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do."
58
"In all nations an exceptional man exists that compensates the deficiencies of the remainder. In those moments, when humanity is found collectively in a state of decadence, there always remain those exceptional beings as point of reference."
58
"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another."
Life,
57
"Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."
57
"Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power."
57
"Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries."
56
"What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart."
56
"Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise."
56
"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."
56
"Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?"
56
"The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know."
55
"Fear is always triggered by creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It is, however, something to be dealt with."
55
"I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading."
55
"As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are."
55
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
55
bottom of page