top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good."
50
"Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power."
50
"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
49
"O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!"
49
"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."
49
"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another."
Life,
48
"I think all writing is done through memory."
48
"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."
48
"To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession."
46
"The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up."
46
"If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing."
46
"Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful."
45
"The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know."
45
"What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart."
45
"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."
45
"Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it."
45
"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."
45
"But everything of value about me is in my books."
45
"Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs."
44
"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."
44
"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."
44
"Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries."
43
"I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading."
43
"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."
43
"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."
43
"Every time a child says I don't believe in fairies there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
42
"What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude."
42
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
42
"Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction."
42
bottom of page