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Quotes by Novelist
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
149
"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."
147
"The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next."
144
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
Life,
143
"Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries."
142
"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
142
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
142
"If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?"
141
"The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know."
140
"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."
140
"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another."
Life,
139
"The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing."
139
"Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."
139
"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good."
138
"What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude."
138
"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."
138
"Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful."
136
"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."
136
"Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred."
135
"I think all writing is done through memory."
135
"There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant."
135
"The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up."
135
"This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true."
135
"What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart."
133
"But everything of value about me is in my books."
133
"The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it."
132
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
131
"All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there."
130
"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."
128
"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."
128
"A book is not completed till it's read."
128
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