English Novelist Quotes

Jane Austen

Agatha Christie

Rudyard Kipling

Virginia Woolf

G. K. Chesterton

Douglas Adams

Emily Brontë

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

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

There are times when Science does not satisfy.

Rudyard Kipling

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.

Margery Allingham

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.

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.

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

Astronomy is certainly an alluring science; set an astronomer before a telescope, and an overwhelming attraction draws his soul away through the tube up into heaven, and leaves his body without mundane interests.

Sabine Baring-Gould

There are writers who exist to confirm people's feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That's the opposite to what I do. I'm presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood.

He did not think, with the Caliph Omar Ben Adalaziz, that it was necessary to make a hell of this world to enjoy Paradise in the next.

William Thomas Beckford

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.

Solitude and quiet are highly desirable, but the lack of them is no barrier to writing... The will to work builds all the seclusion that one needs.

I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is (correcting himself), I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience.

Charlotte Brontë

Look on the grave where thou must sleep Thy last, and strongest foe; It is endurance not to weep, If that repose seem woe.

Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.

My heroines are always virgins. They never go to bed without a ring on their fingers; not until page 118 at least.

Barbara Cartland

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

Well, Buttermere, this is a day that is good to live and breathe in, that makes a man feel in his prime. Standing here in front of my house, I feel as young as when I moved into it thirty years ago, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-nine. What aged man would you take me to be, as I step as it were casually into your view?

Ivy Compton-Burnett

O how beautiful is morning!
How the sunbeams strike the daisies
And the kingcups fill the meadow
Like a golden-shielded army
Marching to the uplands fair.

I send thee pansies while the year is young,
Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night;
Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung
By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.