20th-century Novelist Quotes

J. K. Rowling

F. Scott Fitzgerald

C. S. Lewis

Gabriel García Márquez

Vladimir Nabokov

Douglas Adams

Naguib Mahfouz

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

There's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

György Konrád

When debts are not paid because they cannot be paid, the best thing to do is not talk about them, and shuffle the cards again.

Camilo José Cela

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

Their gaze met for a few seconds. The exchange was as warm and friendly as a pair of automated range finders getting a mutual target lock.

The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.

The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.

Lloyd Alexander

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.

Margery Allingham

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

Dorothy Allison

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.