Quotes by British Authors - Page 173

I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
Virginia Woolf
All raw, uncooked, protesting."(on Aldous Huxley)
Virginia Woolf
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.
D.H. Lawrence
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
Evelyn Waugh
An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)
H.G.Wells
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
Noël Coward
To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.
Ruth Rendell
I am too much of an imitator to be a true writer.
Zia Haider Rahman
The burning point of paper was the moment where I knew that I would have to remember this. Because people would have to remember books, if other people burn them or forget them. We will commit them to memory. We will be come them. We become authors. We become their books.
Neil Gaiman
Books are the most important of all my possessions. They capture the thoughts, feelings, dreams and lives of their authors, welcoming us into their worlds and inspiring us to emulate their adventures.
Fennel Hudson
Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.
Hilary Mantel
I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn't sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn't the point.
Joanna Penn
The public has an exalted view of authors, and rightly so. Great writers impact deeply on our imagination. And yet, behind the kudos, there sometimes lurks a person at odds with the nobility of the author photo or the 'sheer humanity' of the prose style.
Conrad Williams
It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
Samuel Johnson
It's not a job but a condition.(Alan Garner on writing)
Alan Garner
Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.
Alan Hollinghurst
Authors need readers and not followers. Authors need review and not Likes!
Lily Amis
I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.
Neil Gaiman
The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.
Benjamin Disraeli
A Rainmaker creates value for the benefit of all through commitment.
Jonas Caino
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.
W Somerset Maugham
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.
Ian McEwan
Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not see
G.K. Chesterton
I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue.("The Accursed Cordonnier")
Bernard Capes
Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.
Salman Rushdie
I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so questioned.
Philippa Gregory
The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.
Terry Pratchett
The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It's much easier to convince yourself that you're reasonable and civilised, than soft and weak, isn't it?
Kevin Dutton
That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth
Alastair Reynolds
But I was born in the image of God, a man, a creator, with power of life and death, a father, blessed with the gift of the seed of Adam, a sower of seed, to bring forth generations of new life.This I was, and envying a kettle.
Richard Llewellyn
The beauty and music...It is a call...And some are not strong.
Richard Llewellyn
You say that Caesar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant accident. In this world of sin and sorrow if virtue triumphs over vice it is not because it is virtuous, but because it has better and bigger guns; if honesty prevails over double-dealing, it is not because it is honest, but because it has a stronger army more ably led; and if good overcomes evil it is not because it is good, but because it has a well-lined purse. It is well to have right on our side, but it madness to forget that unless we have might as well it will avail us nothing. We must believe that God loves men of good will, but there is no evidence to show that He will save fools from the result of their folly.
W Somerset Maugham
Really, seeing the amount we give in charity, the wonder is there are any poor left. It is a comfort that there are. What should we do without them? Our fur-clad little girls! our jolly, red-faced squires! we should never know how good they were, but for the poor? Without the poor how could we be virtuous? We should have to go about giving to each other. And friends expect such expensive presents, while a shilling here and there among the poor brings to us all the sensations of a good Samaritan. Providence has been very thoughtful in providing us with poor.
Jerome K. Jerome
It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch's wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One must either be a good monarch like yourself, or a good courtier like myself—either an Emperor or an idiot.
Robert Graves
The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.
Alexander Pope
The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.
Angela Carter
Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.
Angela Carter
Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy's atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror.
C.S. Lewis
What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?
George Eliot
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G.K. Chesterton
Remember in any case, that not only the Adept, but anyone with the smallest capacity for Adeptship, is fundamentally an Artist; he will certainly not possess any of those bourgeois "virtues" which are just so many reactions to Blue Funk.
Aleister Crowley
What virtue is it that is born with us?Much less can honor be ascribed thereto,Honor is purchased by the deeds we do.Believe me, Hero, honor is not won,Until some honorable deed be done.----From “Hero and Leander, Sestiad I
Christopher Marlowe
...For like a rugged tree you are hard and sound at the core.
H. Rider Haggard
Virtue - to be good and just -Every heart, when sifted well,Is a clot of warmer dust,Mix'd with cunning sparks of hell.- The Vision of Sin
Alfred Tennyson
If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love - You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.
C.S. Lewis
You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish. I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.
Barbara Pym
Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.
Ben Jonson
Riches, the dumb god that giv'st all men tongues, / That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things; / The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, / Is made worth heaven!
Ben Jonson
We are all each of us riddles, when unknown one to the other. The plain map of human powers and purposes, helps us not at all to thread the labyrinth each individual presents in his involution of feelings, desires and capacities; and we must resemble, in quickness of feeling, instinctive sympathy, and warm benevolence, the lovely daughter of Huntley, before we can hope to judge rightly of the good and virtuous of our fellow-creatures.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
C.S. Lewis
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
G.K. Chesterton
The charm of your society, my Sparrow, lies in not knowing what you will say next – though one rapidly learns to expect the worst!
Georgette Heyer
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”Waddington, smiling, translated the question.“She says I’m good.”“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
W Somerset Maugham
I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.
W Somerset Maugham
Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.
N.T. Wright
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Elizabeth Taylor
But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?""Yes, I am fond of history.""I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome.
Jane Austen
All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.
Terry Pratchett