Novelist Quotes

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

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

Growing up is like taking down the sides of your house and letting strangers walk in.

We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.

Patrick O'Brian

It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what was really in one's mind.

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.

Elizabeth Kostova

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

Lawrence Durrell

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.

Anne Rivers Siddons

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.

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

Anthony Trollope

The ability to achieve goals is directly related to a willingness to use the wastebasket.

Barbara Hemphill

Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

Alix Kates Shulman

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.

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.

Anyone who works on a quilt, who devotes her time, energy, creativity, and passion to that art, learns to value the work of her hands. And as any quilter will tell you, a quilter's quilting friends are some of the dearest, most generous, and most supportive people she knows.

Jennifer Chiaverini

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

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

Bernard Cornwell

The sun, we say, is the cause of heat, but the heat is the sun, hence on this window-ledge.

William Hale White

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

Why do you think nothing concrete and lasting happened out of the 60s? Lots of people have been saying this lately, and I can't help feeling that the changes were so profound and total that no one remembers that there were changes! The 50s, my friends, happened in a different country than this one. We did not get everything we wanted, no. The world is not perfect now, and is that why some of us think we accomplished nothing? … Try to remember what life was like in the 50s. That's all I can say to that. It's the power structures that are trying to pretend that the change wasn't lasting, so they can convince people that protests and the like are futile now.
But they lie. I'm glad to see that many young people aren't buying it.

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.