British Novelist Quotes

J. K. Rowling

C. S. Lewis

William Makepeace Thackeray

Anne Brontë

Evelyn Waugh

Daphne du Maurier

John le Carré

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.

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.

Oh, that in religion, as in everything else, man would judge his brother man by his own heart; and as dear, as precious as his peculiar creed may be to him, believe so it is with the faith of his brother!

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

Welcome, brave Hero, to this course Retreat,
Thou who excell'st whatever Rome call'd great;
Great as thou art, yet others of thy Name
Shall thee transcend in martial Acts and Fame.
Two shall their Names from Africa receive,
As Asia did to thee thy Glories give.

He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadn't told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?

Kyril Bonfiglioli

Farewell to Thee! But not farewell To all my fondest thoughts of Thee; Within my heart they still shall dwell And they shall cheer and comfort me.

At dawn, a railwaywoman
On a country platform whirls on the end of a chain
An irrelevant key, while a young guard makes to wipe
A crumb from her lapel; and see, she smiles
A permissory smile you take in from your corner seat:
A cameo of unrehearsed perfection.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

I cannot remember a time when I was not enraptured or tortured by words. Always there have been words which, sometimes for their sound alone, sometimes for their sound and sense, I would not use. From a loathing of their grossness or sickliness, their weight or want of weight. Their inexactitude, their feeling of acidity or insipidity. Their action, not only on the intelligence but on the nerves, was instant...

But what was a body? Dust, dung, urine, itches. It was the light within which was important, and it was not significant if that light endured after death, or if the soul was blinded eternally in the endless night of the suspired flesh.

Taylor Caldwell

People who wear glasses, without them they always look unfocused, vulnerable. Out in the open. A layer removed.

I feeling pretty sensibly that it was not going by the right door and knocking desperately at the wrong one, I told him of it: "Pooh," says he "my dear, any port in a storm."

O, to bring back the great Homeric time, The simple manners and the deed sublime: When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate, Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

Mortimer Collins

The Jewish religion has it completely right in maintaining you should think very carefully about what you eat.

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

Lawrence Durrell

He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world.

Eric Rücker Eddison

Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.