Novelist Quotes

"You got a ninety percent chance," he said. Osno said quickly, "How do you get that figure?" He always did that whenever somebody pulled a statistic on him. He hated statisticians.

The sudden and abrupt removal of my all-consuming goal... well, it was like I was a donut, and somebody had sucked all the jelly out of me. But I could stuff new jelly in there. It would just get my hands a little sticky in the process.

Brandon Sanderson

Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.

If the world held magic powerful enough to make the elephant appear, then there must exist, too, magic in equal measure, magic powerful enough to undo what had been done.

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.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.

Since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way — with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

I mucked about with his hair. His shoes
were where he left them. His shoes are where he
left them.

People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.

You won't regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.

Bernard Cornwell

It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

A man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska—sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.

Of C. P. Snow

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

I have learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

Seán Ó Faoláin

London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member.

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.

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information.

Margaret Millar

The birth of a child is in many ways the end of a marriage - marriage including a child has to be reinvented, and reinvented at a time when both husband and wife are under unprecedented stress and the wife is exhausted, physically drained, and emotionally in shock. A man's conflict between wanting his child to have a mother and wanting to have the mother to himself is potentially intolerable.

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

Anthony Trollope

Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.

The tiny flame danced beneath her fluttering breath, and she lifted the taper high above her head as she warily approached her visitor. His translucent eyes reflected the flickering light, and the hungry yearning visible in those luminous depths was so intense it seemed almost tangible.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

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.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.