British Author Quotes

How sad that we can now go up in aeroplanes and see that there are no gods upon the clouds.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney

My love for my father has never been touched or approached by any other love. I hold him in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings.

It's mind control, see. You have to go to school, get those exams, get to university or college, get a job, get married, don't miss the boat, do it now or you'll shoot your life down the drain. Yeah. They got you as soon as you were born. They never risked a second of your life. When you have kids they'll be telling them they have to wear a plastic mask and put a penny in the slot about their nose before they can breathe in.

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

One of the most important lessons she'd recently learned was that looking strong and confident was sometimes all the people required of you.

Stuart Hill (author)

To what new realms of marvel, say, Will conquering science war its way?

William Cox Bennett

I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual.

There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to - learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad - but I just didn't have the time.

Adventure must be held in delicate fingers. It should be handled, not embraced. It should be sipped, not swallowed at a gulp.

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can't get fresh fruit in the shops.

Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us, ZORAC announced after a short pause. The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious.

Tell England, ye who pass this monument,
We died for her, and here we rest content.

Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.

I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

In the mind all things are written in pictures - there is no alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures and symbols.

Richard Jefferies

I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.

It was a day of gloom, and strange suspense,
And feverish, and inexplicable dread,
In Herculaneum's walls. The heavy, thick,
And torrid atmosphere; the solid, vast,
And strong—edg'd clouds, that through the firmament
In various and opposing courses moved:—
The wild scream of the solitary bird
That, at long intervals, flew terror-driven
On high:—the howling of the red-ey'd dog
As he gaz'd trembling on the angry heavens:-
The hollow moans that swept along the air,
Though every wind was lock'd,-portended all
That nature with some dire event was big,
And labour'd in its birth.

Edwin Atherstone

Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.

Henry Williamson

He gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.

Of Samuel Johnson

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.