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Quotes by Novelist
"If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid."
55
"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
54
"The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing."
54
"What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude."
54
"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."
54
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
Life,
54
"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."
54
"If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing."
54
"Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful."
53
"The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness."
53
"One day you will wake up and there won't be any more time to do the things you've always wanted. Do it now."
53
"The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up."
53
"Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred."
52
"No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking."
52
"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."
52
"Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction."
52
"World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."
52
"The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies."
51
"It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations."
51
"It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living."
50
"In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty-necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness."
50
"Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it."
50
"No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object."
49
"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."
49
"The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western."
49
"Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men."
49
"To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous."
49
"Every time a child says I don't believe in fairies there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
48
"Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs."
48
"A nobler example, because a less personal one, of the pinch of poverty, is when it prevents the accomplishment of some cherished scheme for the benefit of the human race."
47
"I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen."
47
"We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious."
47
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