Novelist Quotes

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

The implications of self-definition, self-celebration, and perhaps not a little self-inflation and self-designation are nevertheless quite as obvious in each as for all.

Albert Murray (writer)

What goes on when people overfetishize safety is that they're relapsing into that old frame of mind that what we're doing is BAD.

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

"You know, Mouse," [Tabby] said, "a brilliant cat like me should have smart friends; people who can count to more than four." "I can count to more than four," answered Mouse, very offended. "And I can do hard sums, and I know geography and history, and I can knit and..."

We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, and cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product.

Richard McKenna

He was an admirer of the bullfight, and had once drawn my attention to the fact that only cricket and bullfighting had inspired any appreciable literature.

I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.

R. Scott Bakker

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.

You are a terror, aren't you? Leave this yard alone. I know just where everything is in it, and I won't be able to find the things I need for my transport spells if you tidy them up.'So there was probably a bundle of souls or a box of chewed hearts somewhere out here, Sophie thought. She felt really thwarted. 'Tidying up is what I'm here for!' she shouted at Howl. 'Then you must think of a new meaning for your life,' Howl said.

Diana Wynne Jones

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

The way we lay
we mimed a body
of water. It was
this or that way
with
the dead and we
were them.

Nathaniel Mackey

If you don't burn the candle at both ends, what's the candle got two ends for?

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

There is no power in nature which from nothing could have made the universe, and none which could reduce the universe to nothing:

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.

The people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fate takes at them. Nobody'll make a song about them, but they're heroes all the same.

Mercedes Lackey

People without curiosity are like houses without books: there's something unsettling about them.

And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.

The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

I'm so black they call me nighttime
When I walk along everyone looks for stars.

I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom.