English Novelist Quotes

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.

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.

It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.

Abigail Tarttelin

But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard

Andrew Miller (novelist)

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

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.

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.

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

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

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

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me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

But truth, that dangerous commodity, has a way of sticking...

To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.

To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life.

Sarah Stickney Ellis

Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.

J. B. Priestley

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

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

The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette.

Christopher Isherwood

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.

There's no way out of this, it's stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.

Ainsley walked round him, shivering and rubbing his nose. The nose felt that it was running, or felt that it didn't feel it was running when it was

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.

Bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery.