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Quotes by Novelist
"No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful."
22
"A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience."
21
"We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire."
21
"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid."
21
"If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction."
21
"Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps."
20
"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."
20
"Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats."
20
"All TV can do is capture the spirit of a book because the medium is so utterly different. But I'm very grateful for the readers that Masterpiece Theatre has undoubtedly brought me."
20
"Joseph and his mother come from the black kings who were before the white man."
19
"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."
19
"At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with."
19
"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."
19
"To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man."
19
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
19
"I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
19
"People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way."
18
"It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep."
18
"From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment."
18
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
18
"The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."
18
"Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return."
18
"Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others."
18
"Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization."
17
"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."
17
"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."
17
"I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom."
17
"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
17
"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."
17
"Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another."
17
"She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."
16
"Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse."
16
"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter."
16
"In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India."
16
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