Quotes by British Authors - Page 739

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
George Orwell
Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!
Lee Child
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
Salman Rushdie
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
Samuel Johnson
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
Neil Gaiman
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
Ian McEwan
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
Diane Setterfield
A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!
Lewis Carroll
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
Winston S. Churchill
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia Woolf
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
David Mitchell
What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
Ted Hughes
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
Graham Greene
If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.
George Gordon Byron
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
Philip Pullman
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
George Orwell
If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!
Jackie Collins
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia Woolf
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
Alan W. Watts
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.", February 25, 1933]
Cyril Connolly
When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.
Neil Gaiman
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it
Roald Dahl
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
Anthony Trollope
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Anthony Burgess
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
J.R.R. Tolkien
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
Christopher Hitchens
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
Neil Gaiman
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
Neil Gaiman
You can make anything by writing.
C.S. Lewis
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Virginia Woolf
Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.
Daphne du Maurier
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
Neil Gaiman
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
Neil Gaiman
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Charles Dickens
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
Philip Pullman
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
Aldous Huxley
There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
Beatrix Potter
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W Somerset Maugham
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf
The Prayer that precedes all other prayer is, may the real me meet the real you.
C.S. Lewis
The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
C.S. Lewis
And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with God.
C.S. Lewis
Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of the marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
C.S. Lewis
Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
C.S. Lewis
The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light; and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?'When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if there are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
C.S. Lewis
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
C.S. Lewis
I believe this not in the sense that it is part of my creed, but in the sense that it is one of my opinions. My religion would not be in ruins if this opinion were shown to be false.
C.S. Lewis
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will - that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings - then we may take it (that) it is worth paying.
C.S. Lewis
If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?
C.S. Lewis
A few nights after his conversion he asked how long this Gospel had been known in England. He was told that we had known it for some hundreds of years."What!" said he, amazed; "is it possible that for hundreds of years you have had the knowledge of those glad tidings in your possession, and yet have only now come to preach it to us? My father sought after the Truth for more than twenty years, and died without finding it. Oh, why did you not come sooner?
Hudson Taylor
Anyone who, neglecting that fixed hour of prayer, [will] say he can pray at all times but will probably end in praying at no time.
Eric Liddell