Novelist Quotes

Success, which is not always a proof of merit, depends more often on the choice of a subject than on its execution.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

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

I feeling pretty sensibly that it was not going by the right door and knocking desperately at the wrong one, I told him of it: "Pooh," says he "my dear, any port in a storm."

It's pretty human to smash the guy or the thing which tries to tell us something we don't want to hear.

Because time isn't something that always proceeds at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes.

O, to bring back the great Homeric time, The simple manners and the deed sublime: When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate, Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

Mortimer Collins

I am writing to apply for the position of bookkeeper. Attached, you will find my list of qualifications. I have been keeping books for four years now, and I am never going to give them back.

Well, Buttermere, this is a day that is good to live and breathe in, that makes a man feel in his prime. Standing here in front of my house, I feel as young as when I moved into it thirty years ago, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-nine. What aged man would you take me to be, as I step as it were casually into your view?

Ivy Compton-Burnett

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.

The Jewish religion has it completely right in maintaining you should think very carefully about what you eat.

O how beautiful is morning!
How the sunbeams strike the daisies
And the kingcups fill the meadow
Like a golden-shielded army
Marching to the uplands fair.

Fear made the gods; audacity has made kings.

Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon

Awake thee, my Lady-Love! Wake thee, and rise! The sun through the bower peeps Into thine eyes.

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation...

Alphonse Daudet

She spun, as a matter of form and status alone, her woollen yarn and her oft-breaking thread. What else did she spin? he wondered. And the answer, not spoken aloud, was, a web.
And one that now seemed sure to hold him fast.
To hold him fast indeed.

"… the National Football League needs "a guardian, not a CEO" to deal with the fact that "the sport is simply more and more identified with violence, both in its inherent nature and in its savage personnel."

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

Uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is nothing, mere clay; and without visible circumstance, a territory, to connect to, our spirit is shapeless, nameless, and undefined.

I'm as true a Protestant, in sooth, as any fine lady that walks into church, but it's not wrong to turn sometimes to the good St. Nicholas.

Mary Mapes Dodge

Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?

Stephen R. Donaldson