20th-century Novelist Quotes

J. K. Rowling

F. Scott Fitzgerald

C. S. Lewis

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Gabriel García Márquez

Vladimir Nabokov

Douglas Adams

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

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.

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.

Nothing now remains for us seven but to go back to Stable Hill, proclaim the truth, and take the adventure that Aslan sends us.

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

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

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

But pain is hard to put into words and in life there is always pain. It's as natural as birth or death. Pain makes us who we are, it teaches us and tames us, it can destroy and it can save.

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Christopher Fowler

Hey, God made us sexual creatures. If he wanted teenagers to wait that long, he would have made puberty start at twenty-five.

The healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he has an abscess on his knee or in his soul.

Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.

We have to use our freedoms and privileges to see what respite we can give to those less equipped to deal with their challenges.

Romance is not an idea, but a moment. An unspoken glance when someone looks into your eyes and knows exactly who you are, what you need.

Maybe you've got the patience to work out some complicated, long-term, ironic way to get back at the people who've wronged you, but that's you.

Greg Cox (writer)

Shrews are not mutual murderers. We'll just square off and touch whiskers, assessing each other. Then we'll try to out-squeak each other.

I knew people were talking, but I wasn't listening. I wasn't interested in anything anyone had to say.

Michael Thomas Ford

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

America was the worst place in the world in which to fail, fall sick, get old or die, because then your problems had crystallised into the unforgivable sin. Failure.

People didn't really like McDonald's, same as her mum didn't really like Catholicism, but when you were new in town, at least it was a known quantity. So that'll be a Quarter-Pounder and a Communion Wafer meal-deal to go.

Christopher Brookmyre

Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.