Novelist Quotes

We can either laugh in the face of death or die trying not to.

James Grippando

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

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

Richard McKenna

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

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.

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

There was a thick carpet upon the floor, a sofa piled with cushions in one corner, and several other articles of furniture. The walls, however, were uncovered and were stained with damp. A great pink fungus stood out within a few inches of the bed, a grim mixture of exquisite colouring and loathsome imperfections. The atmosphere was fetid.

E. Phillips Oppenheim

There comes a moment in your life when, no matter what you do, you bore everybody else. There is only one way to get back the lost prestige. Dying.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

My job is to ensure the sanctity of this House. Ensuring the sanity of its Master seemed like a good start.

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.

Then on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy. In the end, all you get is a few words.

Scott Nicholson

Sam took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly because he no longer had feeling in his extremities.

Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars.

And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.

Kerry Greenwood

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.

On the wings of love, we'll soar to the depths.

John Reed (novelist)

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.

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

It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.

Deb Olin Unferth

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.

Writing that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.

Maria Dahvana Headley

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

Sunday, that day so tedious to the triflers of earth, so full of beautiful reposes of calmness and strength for the earnest and heavenly minded.

Maria Jane McIntosh

You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, 'Oh yes, I remember how that feels.' But you can't.

"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..."