Author Quotes

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are!

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Sholem Aleichem

I am human: nothing human is alien to me.

In Latin: Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.

A persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Georges Courteline

Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.

Jacopo Sannazaro

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

Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

José Bergamín

True human life does not take place in time but always "is" at the "timeless" point where the past becomes the future - a point which we incorrectly label the present. This is a timeless point, and people are free only at this point.

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

Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels.

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

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

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way

Isaac Rosenberg

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

Negligence is the rust of the soul that corrodes through all her best resolves.

Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that result to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize. Such natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. Between two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize, there is no veil, and there can be no obstacle. Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining.

Henry David Thoreau

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.

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

Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself -- thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.

One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

G. K. Chesterton

To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.

Agatha Christie

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

William Faulkner