Quotes by Women Novelists

Jane Austen

J. K. Rowling

Agatha Christie

Virginia Woolf

Colette

Selma Lagerlöf

Pearl S. Buck

A persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.

Agatha Christie

So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

Oh, that in religion, as in everything else, man would judge his brother man by his own heart; and as dear, as precious as his peculiar creed may be to him, believe so it is with the faith of his brother!

As Rose stood by him watching the ease with which he quickly brought order out of chaos, she privately resolved to hunt up her old arithmetic and perfect herself in the four first rules, with a good tug at fractions, before she read any more fairy tales.

Louisa May Alcott

It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.

Margery Allingham

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

Dorothy Allison

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

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

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.

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.

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.

My insides still turn over when he looks at me that certain way.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

Elizabeth Bowen

Fear is a way of not allowing yourself to choose freely what you will do next; a way of letting your body's reflexes, not the needs of your mind, choose for you.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don't care if they're sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English.

Farewell to Thee! But not farewell To all my fondest thoughts of Thee; Within my heart they still shall dwell And they shall cheer and comfort me.

I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is (correcting himself), I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience.

Charlotte Brontë

Look on the grave where thou must sleep Thy last, and strongest foe; It is endurance not to weep, If that repose seem woe.