Author Quotes

We must go for a day in the country and when surrounded by the gay twittering of the birds and the smell of the cows I will lay my suit at her feet and he waved his arm wildly at the gay thought.

There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.

This was no friendship, to forsake your friend, To promise your support and at the end Abandon him-this was sheer treachery. Friend follows friend to hell and blasphemy- When sorrow comes one's true friends are found; In times of joy ten thousand gather round.

Attar of Nishapur

All writers feel struck by the limitations of language.

Margaret Atwood

And His that gentle voice we hear,
Soft as the breath of even.

What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hillside;
The hill-tops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.

Every day you make a choice either to sow some of your seed or to eat it. When you exercise faith and sow, you release God's law of prosperity. When you give in to your fear and eat your seed, or hide it, you release God's law of poverty.

Salad, I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know.

This was a good beginning. All the outmoded rules of the hospital were broken. Minds which had been tied down by subservience to foreign experience were now set in motion. People began to speak, to think and to act boldly. A new world opened in front of them. They knew that what they were doing now was something unprecedented which doctors in capitalist countries had not been able to do. They were engaged in a battle to save lives and as the scope of the battle became wider an increasing number of people were drawn in. Later on when a difficulty occurred in the course of treatment they solicited the opinions of many doctors both within and without the hospital, depending on the wisdom of the many to tide over one crisis after another.

The writer doesn't push story into us, he withholds information in order that we draw his story out of ourselves.

David Baboulene

My own soul is my most faithful friend. My own heart, my truest confidant.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Paolo Bacigalupi

It is in the nature of theoretical science that there can be no such thing as certainty. A theory is only "true" for as long as the majority of the scientific community maintain the view that the theory is the one best able to explain the observations.

For ivy climbs the crumbling hall To decorate decay.

Philip James Bailey

It is so seldom that a young fellow has any inclination for the company of an old man...

After she wrote her first two novels:

I thought I'd walk down the street and everybody would know I had written a book. But nobody took any notice of these two novels, and I stopped writing. I felt uneasy for about three years.

Beryl Bainbridge

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

You truly are an extraordinary man, Mr Sandeen. Nobody I know counts weeks. That is absolutely marvelous.

Marjaneh Bakhtiari

I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.

R. Scott Bakker

Painters have often taught writers how to see.

I'm never happier than when I can write about draining swimming pools and abandoned hotels.

There is one court whose "findings" are incontrovertible, and whose sessions are held in the chambers of our own breast.

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

Honoré de Balzac

Public utility is often served by the injury of individuals.

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac