English Novelist Quotes

Jane Austen

Agatha Christie

Rudyard Kipling

Virginia Woolf

G. K. Chesterton

Douglas Adams

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

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.

It's stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone.

Louis de Bernières

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

Lady Cynthia Asquith

I love my children…I'm delighted to see them come and delighted to see them go.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

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

Barbara Cartland

The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette.

Christopher Isherwood

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me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.

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.

We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.

Patrick O'Brian

People only know what you tell them.And it was true.People gave out their whole life stories to anyone and everyone without a second's thought.Stand at a bus stop, sit in a strange pub, get banged up, and someone would always give you their life story.It was as if they were trying to prove they existed

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds.

Anthony Trollope

No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature.... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

The only situation which might justify panic is one in which panic is likely to help. Such a situation never arises. Though pretended panic may sometimes cause a useful diversion, real panic can never be anything other than a waste of energy.

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

What has patriotism come to be but greed and false pride, when the only way it can show itself is by shedding blood to gain gold? More economic advantage, more territory, more power.

Sylvia Thompson

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

There is a passion of reverence, almost of pity, mingling with the love of an honest man for a pure girl, which makes it the most exquisite, perhaps, of all human sentiments.

The trouble with Ian [Fleming] is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.

Rosamond Lehmann