Novelist Quotes

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

Despite everything that Harlem did to our generation, I think it gave something to a few. It gave them a strength that couldn't be obtained anywhere else.

Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.

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

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

William Hale White

So, without saying anything to the others, it made its way to the farthest corner of the meadow and began to toast an imaginary muffin. That was always the best way to unwind when things got to be too much for it.

Thomas M. Disch

I don't have so many friends I can afford to drop one just because he tried to kill me.

Loren D. Estleman

The sudden and abrupt removal of my all-consuming goal... well, it was like I was a donut, and somebody had sucked all the jelly out of me. But I could stuff new jelly in there. It would just get my hands a little sticky in the process.

Brandon Sanderson

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

The tiny flame danced beneath her fluttering breath, and she lifted the taper high above her head as she warily approached her visitor. His translucent eyes reflected the flickering light, and the hungry yearning visible in those luminous depths was so intense it seemed almost tangible.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.

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

Lawrence Durrell

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

Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.

It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

The birth of a child is in many ways the end of a marriage - marriage including a child has to be reinvented, and reinvented at a time when both husband and wife are under unprecedented stress and the wife is exhausted, physically drained, and emotionally in shock. A man's conflict between wanting his child to have a mother and wanting to have the mother to himself is potentially intolerable.

It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin.

Robert Sheckley

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 learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

Seán Ó Faoláin

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

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

Bernard Cornwell

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

Barbara Hemphill

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.

We are the kind of short-
term visitors who
each engage the heart
of each
others lives, one
anothers bodies;
sometimes forever yet
so brief the
sad distance
of
our all-night transit
leaves us
numb: to love.