Quotes by British Authors - Page 7

Live as long as you may the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
Robert Southey
All the world's a mass of folly Youth is gay age melancholy: Youth is spending age is thrifty Mad at twenty cold at fifty Man is nought but folly's slave From the cradle to the grave.
W. H. Ireland
In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves For a bright manhood there is no such word As fail.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!
Lord Byron
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever outlast the sea the earth and all men.
Joseph Conrad
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Only the young die good.
Oliver Herford
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Quentin Crisp
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead
Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.
Samuel Johnson
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson
Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good.
Samuel Johnson
As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.
Virginia Woolf
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.
T.S Eliot
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.
J. Middleton Murry
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.
Malcolm Lowry
The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.
J.B. Priestley
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
Nature not content with denying him the ability to think has endowed him with the ability to write.
A.E. Housman
Less is more.
Robert Browning
When an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
Samuel Johnson
The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.
Samuel Johnson
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Virginia Woolf
Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.
Aldous Huxley
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
Read over your compositions and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you.
Samuel Johnson
When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'
Hilaire Belloc
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.
Edith Sitwell
For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.
Rumer Godden
Every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
William Wordsworth
Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
When my journal appears many statues must come down.
Duke of Wellington
Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves.
Lewis Carroll
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
Robert Graves
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
W.H. Auden
There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing to find honest men to publish it and to get sensible men to read it.
C. C. Colton
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin
Make'em laugh make 'em cry make 'em wait.
Charles Reade
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Memoirs: the backstairs of history.
George Meredith
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st James 2nd and the Old Pretender.
Philip Guedalla
Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.
Samuel Johnson
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump you may be freeing him from being a camel.
G.K. Chesterton
What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? The hearts bleed longest and but heal to wear That which disfigures it.
Lord Byron
I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards they simply unveil them to the eyes of men ... crisis shows us what we have become.
Bishop Westcott
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
Nancy Banks-Smith
Failure is in a sense the highway to success inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true and very fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.
John Keats