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

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

Mary Louisa Molesworth

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

Everyone seems to remember with great clarity what they were doing on November 22nd, 1963, at the precise moment they heard President Kennedy was dead.

Frederick Forsyth

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.

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

Lady Cynthia Asquith

The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette.

Christopher Isherwood

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

Rosamond Lehmann

Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.

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

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.

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.

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

There is no merit in a special talent unless its exercise is of use to others.

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

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.

People always grumbled. If things went well they wanted them to go better. Give them comfort and they wanted luxuries.

Eleanor Hibbert

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.

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.

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