Quotes by British Authors - Page 732

I've found that trying to be like everyone else, do what others do and follow others 'guaranteed path' to 'so-called success' never really works for me. I have found my best strategy is to authentically be me, listen within and follow it....and then to treat and connect with others - wherever I can - personally, personably and individually.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
With Bruford, the album was One Of A Kind. All-instrumental, it possessed the kind of focused vision that allowed for no ifs or buts. With the unnerving confidence of youth, it had This Is What We Do And This Is How We Do It stamped all over it.
Bill Bruford
I may not be beautiful,I may not be tall,I may have no legs,And be hairy and all.I may not be rich,With lifestyle or clothes,I may not tweet,For my arms are too low.I may have warts,An acne or two,I may be incomplete,Compared to all of you.But when I see,The reflection of me,I see someone beautiful,And I know it's me.
Anthony T.Hincks
Whatever your aptitudes, the greatest source of achievement is passion. Aptitude matters, but passion often matters more… If you love doing something, you’ll be constantly drawn to get better at it.
Ken Robinson
Revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact.
Ken Robinson
You speak like a heroine...we shall see if you can suffer like one.
Ann Ward Radcliffe
In business, sport, entertainment and beyond an idea is worth next to nothing. The energy, effort, passion, talent, tenacity, strategy, resilience and resourcefulness to see it through and make something of it is worth everything.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
The world we write is but a dappled expression of the one in which we live.
Virginia Crow
Paradoxically, our imperial global Anglo-American language is dull with the glitter of its own decay. In response, the new meta- physical poet might consider the following cleansing strategies: keep faith with the canonical writers of the past, study Homeric Greek, excavate etymologies, embrace threatened languages, practice the fine art of translation, listen regularly to the musical flow of the breath and the beat of the heart, switch off the television, become a votary of silence.Here lies the beginning of freedom.
Peter Abbs
If I am looking for inspiration, then I read the religious scriptures.
Steven Magee
If you don't start, you're finished.
Max McKeown
Inspiration comes from not only within ourselves, but also from watching life around us.
Anthony T.Hincks
All the wealth in the world is nothing, pointless - of no true value - if you yourself feel worthless.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Tanacity is the dance within the art of opportunity
Rasheed Ogunlaru
What doesn't kill me provides writing material.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
If you think you're unable to be on the cover of Time magazine, make it your business to be there.
Paul Arden
We all have our fears. Anyone who says otherwise is probably scared of admitting it.
Alex Staniforth
Playing it safe might not have hurt anyone, but it wouldn’t have inspired many, either.
Alex Staniforth
Data that comes subliminally and is acted upon will look like luck or inspiration.
Peter Redgrove
Where you are is merely a point along the path to where you are going.
Tony Cleaver
His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.
Peter Redgrove
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
I like to work in watercolor, with as little under-drawing as I can get away with. I like the unpredictability of a medium which is affected as much by humidity, gravity, the way that heavier particles in the wash settle into the undulations of the paper surface, as by whatever I wish to do with it. In other mediums you have more control, you are responsible for every mark on the page — but with watercolor you are in a dialogue with the paint, it responds to you and you respond to it in turn. Printmaking is also like this, it has an unpredictable element. This encourages an intuitive response, a spontaneity which allows magic to happen on the page. When I begin an illustration, I usually work up from small sketches — which indicate in a simple way something of the atmosphere or dynamics of an illustration; then I do drawings on a larger scale supported by studies from models — usually friends — if figures play a large part in the picture. When I've reached a stage where the drawing looks good enough I'll transfer it to watercolor paper, but I like to leave as much unresolved as possible before starting to put on washes. This allows for an interaction with the medium itself, a dialogue between me and the paint. Otherwise it is too much like painting by number, or a one-sided conversation.
Alan Lee
I've been strongly influenced, in technique as well as subject matter, by some of the early 20th-century book illustrators — Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac in particular, Burne-Jones and other Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts-&-Crafts movement they engendered. I'm continually inspired by Rembrandt, Breughel (I've wondered whether his brilliant "Tower of Babel" had inspired Tolkien's description of Minas Tyrith), Hieronymous Bosch, Albrecht Durer, and Turner; it's not necessarily that they influence my work in any particular direction, more that their example raises my spirits, re-affirms my belief in the power of images to move and delight us, and shows me how much further I have to go, how much is possible. Having visited Venice and Florence for the first time, I am besotted with the Italian Renaissance artists — Botticelli, Bellini, da Vinci and others. Their work is calm, controlled, and yet each face and landscape contains such passion. In Botticelli's paintings, every pebble and every leaf is rendered with a religious devotion; there is reverence inherent in paying such close attention to every stone, turning painting itself into a form of worship, an act of prayer.
Alan Lee
Sex is the most important sort of adult play. If you can't relax here you never will
Alex Comfort
When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is "really" there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again."from Coleridge: Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread
Karen Armstrong
...Absorbed in the new scents, the sounds, and the sunlight...
Kenneth Grahame
what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 1
Lewis Carroll
Cease trying to work everything out with your mind. It will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be a Revelation.
Eileen Cady
I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Un archeologo è il miglior marito che una donna possa avere: più lei diventa vecchia, più lui s'interessa a lei.
Agatha Christie
He talked about the future with such certainty, he might have been talking about the past.
Michael Dobbs
We would never call inexplicable little insights 'hunches,' for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.
China Miéville
Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
George Eliot
Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog’s repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people’s earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive
Steve Aylett
Perhaps just to have loved was enough - just to have seen this world,and known it,through the eyes of love.
Rosie Alison
I make music for ears, not eyes
Adele
Pippin glanced in some wonder at the face now close beside his own, for the sound of that laugh had been gay and merry. Yet in the wizard's face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow; though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all there was a great joy: a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.
J.R.R. Tolkien
excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.
William Blake
Inspiration fires you up motivation keeps you burning.
Stuart Aken
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
Tom Stoppard
Facing your fears robs them of their power
Mark Burnett
The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.
Tom Hiddleston
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
Virginia Woolf
That’s what being alive is, Thing! It’s being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing!
Terry Pratchett
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
John Ruskin
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
Alan Bennett
It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by.
Charles Dickens
Come to the edge.We might fall.Come to the edge.It's too high!COME TO THE EDGE!And they cameAnd he pushedAnd they flew.
Christopher Logue
I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.
Peter Ackroyd
Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water.
Malcolm Lowry
Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
Kingsley Amis
Mary Queen of Scots had a little dog, a Skye terrier, that was devoted to her. Moments after Mary was beheaded, the people who were watching saw her skirts moving about and they thought her headless body was trying to get itself to its feet. But the movement turned out to be her dog, which she had carried to the block with her, hidden in her skirts. Mary Stuart is supposed to have faced her execution with grace and courage (she wore a scarlet chemise to suggest she was being martyred), but I don’t think she could have been so brave if she had not secretly been holding tight to her Skye terrier, feeling his warm, silky fur against her trembling skin.
Elizabeth Wein
How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.
Graham Swift
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
Inspiration is the windfall from hard work and focus. Muses are too unreliable to keep on the payroll.
Helen Hanson
It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.
Mary Renault
We have different forms assigned to us in the school of life, different gifts imparted. All is not attractive that is good. Iron is useful, though it does not sparkle like the diamond. Gold has not the fragrance of a flower. So different persons have various modes of excellence, and we must have an eye to all.
William Wilberforce
Every villian is a hero in his own mind.
Tom Hiddleston
A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.
Tobsha Learner