Novelist Quotes

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

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

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.

We must go for a day in the country and when surrounded by the gay twittering of the birds and the smell of the cows I will lay my suit at her feet and he waved his arm wildly at the gay thought.

This was a good beginning. All the outmoded rules of the hospital were broken. Minds which had been tied down by subservience to foreign experience were now set in motion. People began to speak, to think and to act boldly. A new world opened in front of them. They knew that what they were doing now was something unprecedented which doctors in capitalist countries had not been able to do. They were engaged in a battle to save lives and as the scope of the battle became wider an increasing number of people were drawn in. Later on when a difficulty occurred in the course of treatment they solicited the opinions of many doctors both within and without the hospital, depending on the wisdom of the many to tide over one crisis after another.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Paolo Bacigalupi

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

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

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

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.