Quotes by British Authors - Page 538

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words.
W Somerset Maugham
Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn’t in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made.She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn’t been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade.(…)But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn’t necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn’t cringe, she didn’t make herself smaller than she was, she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself.Naturally she was possible only in America, only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison were absent.
Henry James
She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.
Henry James
Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.
Henry James
Of all God’s creatures, only man kills with malice. Only man kills out of vengeance.
R.H.Dickinson
You can thank Henry Ford for that. He was a warlock, you know.
Ian Richards
You have chosen the path of darkness.
Mary Grand
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives
Neil Gaiman
I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?
C.S. Lewis
She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.
Graham Greene
He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.
Thomas Hardy
I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.
Thomas Hardy
There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.
Charles Finch
So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.
Rachel Cusk
Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.
David Mitchell
Stories are just lies made to look like truth.
Johnny Rich
Job understood that he was nothing more than God’s invention and so too was his suffering
Johnny Rich
Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
Neil Gaiman
Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.
Johnny Rich
Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?
Johnny Rich
I know everything must be a lie, but I believe it anyway.
Johnny Rich
The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true.
Neil Gaiman
..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.
Salman Rushdie
That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.
Kelly Marcel & Sue Smith
I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.
Deborah Meyler
Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.
James Wood
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy.
Charles Dickens
We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full need of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.
Barry Unsworth
People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.
Nevil Shute
it was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains....we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.
Nevil Shute
I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly
Nevil Shute
But hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proveth a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when, under the names of John of the Stile, and John of the Nokes, he putteth his case? But that is easily answered: their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history. Painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chess-men; and yet, me thinks, he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop.
Philip Sidney
And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!
Kate Atkinson
I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.
Neil Gaiman
Well, here we are."Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.
Michel Faber
No; you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you: you shall yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand: your heart shall be the victim, and you the priest to transfix it.
Charlotte Brontë
There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.
Angela Carter
At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.
Angela Carter
Sometimes just getting through each day requires almost superhuman strength.
Jojo Moyes
I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewriter smoke in order to keep eating.
Hugh B. Cave
Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.
James Wood
To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.
D.H. Lawrence
It was important to tell people. To let people know that this can happen. Your child's body can stop. Stop breathing, stop beating.
Sarah Moss
The sea is rushing in now as unconsciousness does.I can see a chord, hear gospel songs as we hoist the sails.The sails are a soft white bird. We are airborne. We are primitive.
Suzy Davies
...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.
G.E. Moore
Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.
Andrew Wilson
From 1929 to 1933, [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories. [from preface]
Christopher Isherwood
It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.
Jocelyn Gibb
Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.(…)Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.
Iris Murdoch
All story fiction is both truth that happens and never happens. Fiction is always about humanity, even if no subject is humanitarian or even human.
Richard Bunning
Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.
Guy Fraser-Sampson
As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against real life. But I think there are signs that strange things happen, though they do not emerge
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
Neil Gaiman
Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects, and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us
Charles Dickens
I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
It's never the deviants who are the problem, puss. Don't forget that. It's the people who won't open their minds that are dangerous.
Lucy Ribchester
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Salman Rushdie
Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.
Neil Gaiman
Surely if Alternative Facts are untrue they should be called Ficts?
Alan Dapre