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Quotes by Novelist
"A clever, ugly man every now and then is successful with the ladies, but a handsome fool is irresistible."
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"I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years."
43
"Thus we try to keep our heroes alive, hence we remember them."
43
"Alexandra had been married for thirty-three years; if it had made any impression on her one way or another, she never showed it."
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"Friends help each other when they are...you know...going up international hit men and stuff."
43
"I wanted to make sure that the man who found the genie would not take terrible advantage of her, so he needed to be a person of integrity and honor - which is why I made the male lead an astronaut. The rest, as they say, is history."
43
"I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!"
43
"Terminus sniffed. "I guard borders. I don't kill giants. It's not in my job description."
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"I know there's no such thing as forever. So what can we be, in the now?"
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"Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream."
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"I'll Stay...leave...me....I'll...follow...you."
43
"Religion which lays so many restraints upon us, is a troublesome companion to those who will lay no restraints upon themselves."
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"A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning."
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"My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy."
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"The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you."
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"Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow."
43
"I'm thinking it would be very easy to love you. And easier to call you my friend."
43
"It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]"
43
"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."
43
"A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected."
43
"He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience."
43
"She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death."
43
"To sleep around is absolutely wrong for a woman; it's degrading and it completely ruins her personality. Sooner or later it will destroy all that is feminine and beautiful and idealistic in her."
43
"You are mine, woman, and I am yours. Until you, my life was desolate. I existed, but I didn't truly live. Now I live, even in my death."
43
"You think too much of your "toilette", Adele; but you may have a flower." I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She sighed a sign of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress; there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress."
43
"It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something."
43
"When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read."
43
"Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing."
43
"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong."
43
"If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready'."
43
"I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it."
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