Novelist Quotes

The ability to achieve goals is directly related to a willingness to use the wastebasket.

Barbara Hemphill

Crises of expression and spasms of eros:
that's the man of today,
the inside a vacuum,
the continuity of personality
provided by his suit,
which with stout cloth might be good for ten years.

Rather like spent swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel of the solid ground beneath their feet, the grateful monotony of the skies above their heads,... and everywhere about them the immanence of God.... The Chinaberry Tree became a Temple.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

The most fundamental pride in the world is the pride you have in owning a little piece of land! You've got to live on your own land, walk on it, work in its dirt, to know the final pride of being free.

Janice Holt Giles

Mona's Law. That's what she calls it. She says you can have a hot job, a hot lover and a hot apartment, but you can't have all three at the same time.

Armistead Maupin

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

In life, periods of solitude were blessings. Dying alone was a bitter curse.

Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

Alix Kates Shulman

A man would rather fail according to his own ideas than succeed according to another's.

Kate Langley Bosher

There's a lot more satisfaction in thinking about money than in spending it, if people only knew.

Josephine Pinckney

All my life, I knew, all my life I would be haunted by words from Shakespeare.

Sarah Smith (writer)

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.

Irène Némirovsky

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

Tis emblematic, the rose of youth and health soon fades when watered by the tear of affliction.

My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Growing up is like taking down the sides of your house and letting strangers walk in.

Boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces.

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 have always noticed that people only think you are stupid if you do things differently from them.

I never like anyone till I've seen him at his worst.

We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

Blanche Willis Howard

It is rather calming to remember that you really couldn't have foreseen what is happening to you.

Margaret Widdemer