British Novelist Quotes

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

Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions.

At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - relief or despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking - 'wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant!

Gareth Roberts (writer)

They strip-searched me!" he burst out. "Me! Old enough to be their grandfather and they made me stand naked in the road, my things all unpacked in the mud!

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

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken

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

I know heaps of quotations, so I can always make quite a fair show of knowledge.

The only really satisfactory confidante for your troubles is someone who enjoys them, and this inevitably cuts out anyone who actually loves you.

He turned then to Job, again using the King James's version. The translation from the Hebrew was narrower than the Greek but seemed more essential. It was the simple strong prose of men who believed and who were unafraid to name things.

My idea of marriage, as of every other partnership,... is that each member shall contribute to it his or her personality, unrepressed and uncoerced. Thus, and only thus, we obtain the most complex synthesis possible, which may well surpass in beauty, as it surely does in interest and human value, the separate elements of such an association.

Phyllis Bentley

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

The tranquil current of domestic happiness affords no materials for narrative.

Everyone should find something they love doing. Then work isn't work. It's a part of themselves. Of who they are.

Paul J. McAuley

But we'll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we'll have each other.

The attitude to sexual love in the 'pop' song is so ugly and mechanical as to seem schizoid, and psychopathological. Exposed as they are to such powerful cultural statements, young people are being encouraged to forfeit genuine commitment in love in favour of depersonalised sexual activity, with an undercurrent of violence, and to take false solutions in which they must deny their deepest needs, by hate.

Coercive measures may have a restraining effect for a time, but can never subdue an untractable spirit: it is only by engaging the affections and enlarging the understanding, that the heart can be meliorated or principles be formed; for like a bow forcibly bent, the mind recoils from oppression with elastic power.

Maybe this is a characteristic of happy people. An ability to be entertained by the world.

I didn't have time to lose it. I didn't have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn't have time to miss Jack. Stroma kept on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me, too.

Jenny Valentine

I have a work presently in the Press named 'Six Months in Hell' which you may one day read. I consider it will be worth perusing, bruising badly the morals of Britain and America, while Royalty, clergy, critics, society and bloodhounds of law must all incur its censure.

Amanda McKittrick Ros

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.

And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.

At least half of my life's many mistakes can be safely put down to impetuosity: the other half derive from inertia.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.

Everything passes. Joy. Pain. The moment of triumph; the sigh of despair. Nothing lasts forever - not even this.

Paul Stewart (writer)