English Novelist Quotes

Jane Austen

Agatha Christie

Rudyard Kipling

Virginia Woolf

G. K. Chesterton

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Emily Brontë

To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.

Agatha Christie

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 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.

There are times when Science does not satisfy.

Rudyard Kipling

A journalist who has to borrow a typewriter is bad news.

I can pass days
Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees,
Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,--
The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs,
Each tree a natural harp,--each different leaf
A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

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

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it's ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

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

I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege.

China Miéville

We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments of reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we certainly were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.

H. Rider Haggard

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything and everything is nought.

But while our parting was mutually acceptable and even expedient, still it was painful. And I would like to think it hurt both of us, for I certainly felt it: a wrenching inside, like some small but improbably necessary organ was no longer in there, that it was missing, torn or fallen out. And at the time I'd thought that was the end of it; what was missing was gone forever

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

It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.

Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people.

Lady Cynthia Asquith

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

In following their line through, and those of Plantagenet and Tudor, there is but little to soothe the mind.

Charlotte Turner Smith

The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is... remarkable... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.

Frances Trollope

Kindnesses have wings and roots... wings that never droop, and roots that never die.

Mary Louisa Molesworth

For true happiness, sane enjoyment, you must look to the country, not town. Only you want one true heart beside you with which to enjoy it!

Ellen Buckingham Mathews

I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.

Skullion had little use for contraceptives at the best of times. Unnatural, he called them, and placed them in the lower social category of things along with elastic-sided boots and made-up bow-ties. Not the sort of attire for a gentleman.