Novelist Quotes

I'm never happier than when I can write about draining swimming pools and abandoned hotels.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

Whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.

Astronomy is certainly an alluring science; set an astronomer before a telescope, and an overwhelming attraction draws his soul away through the tube up into heaven, and leaves his body without mundane interests.

Sabine Baring-Gould

Welcome, brave Hero, to this course Retreat,
Thou who excell'st whatever Rome call'd great;
Great as thou art, yet others of thy Name
Shall thee transcend in martial Acts and Fame.
Two shall their Names from Africa receive,
As Asia did to thee thy Glories give.

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.

If you want to learn a culture, you have to learn how to like what it likes, rather than go looking for something that you like.

No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another

We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to know that.

I shared this insight with some other boat owners, and they all agreed that, definitely, putting your boar into the water is asking for trouble. Most of them have had their boats sitting in their driveways long enough to be registered historical landmarks.

The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations—particularly when the something you're fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.

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

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.

Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.

Georges Bernanos

My insides still turn over when he looks at me that certain way.

History and fiction must complement one another.

He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadn't told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?

Kyril Bonfiglioli

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

Elizabeth Bowen

Fear is a way of not allowing yourself to choose freely what you will do next; a way of letting your body's reflexes, not the needs of your mind, choose for you.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

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.

I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.

Richard Brautigan

Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don't care if they're sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English.