top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Novelist
"Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait."
28
"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid."
28
"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving."
28
"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."
27
"The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do."
27
"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."
27
"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."
27
"Youth is gone -- gone -- and will never come back: can't help it."
27
"But magic is neither good nor evil. It is a tool, like a knife. Is a knife evil? Only if the wielder is evil."
27
"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."
27
"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."
27
"If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed."
27
"Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps."
26
"Joseph and his mother come from the black kings who were before the white man."
26
"The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies."
26
"In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that."
26
"No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful."
26
"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."
25
"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet."
25
"Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations."
25
"At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with."
25
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
25
"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."
25
"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
25
"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."
25
"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
25
"Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she'd never see again. She took every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind."
25
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."
25
"All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity."
24
"Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse."
24
"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."
24
"Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization."
24
"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."
24
"Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."
24
"One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to."
24
"I found myself with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause."
24
"People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way."
23
"Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors."
23
"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."
23
"Percy: "You asked Poseidon for" me? Tyson: "For a friend, young cyclopes grow up alone on the streets, learns to make things out of scraps. Learn to survive." Percy: "But that's so cruel! Tyson: "Makes us appreciate blessings, not be greedy and mean and fat like Polyphemus. But I got scared. Monsters chased me so much, clawed me sometimes--" Percy: "The scars on your back? Tyson: "Sphinx on Seventy-second Street. Big Bully. I prayed to Daddy for help. Soon the people at Meriwether found me. Mey you. Biggest blessing ever. Sorry I said Poseidon was mean. He sent me a brother."
23
bottom of page