Quotes by Novelists

A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.
Thomas Mann
Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favourite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'.
Wole Soyinka
Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.
Jasper Fforde
He restrained himself from another wisecrack, infinitesimally but with great effort attempting to close down his nightclub approach to education; every positive change in his life, every minute increment in character, acquired more or less through shame.
Richard Price
A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.
José Saramago
She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.
Elias Canetti
Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.
Émile Zola
Personally, I think, so what? Money's just a thing and things change. That's what I've found. One minute something's really there, right next to you, and you can cuddle up to it. The next it just melts away, like a Hershey's kiss.
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?
W Somerset Maugham
The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?
William Makepeace Thackeray
Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.
Jasper Fforde
Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.
Richard Llewellyn
Tribal Chief 1: The will of the people is what is best. That is what democracy meansTribal Chief 2: But if the people don’t know what they are talking about, how can that be the best?
Leonard Wibberley
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Our power comes from the earth
Luis Alberto Urrea
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm
Guy de Maupassant
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
There is entirely too much tut-tutting in this realm, if you ask me. All these kings would do a deal better if they put down their swords and listened to their mothers.
George R.R. Martin
The 'Righteous' are mightier than 'God.
Shivish
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
W Somerset Maugham
When peoples cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
Langston Hughes
I CAN'T GO ON! I FEEL LIKE NONE OF MY EMOTIONAL WOUNDS CAN HEAL! AS SOON AS IT TRIES TO HEAL, IT SHATTERS AGAIN! I CAN'T HEAL!
Shine
Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths.
George R.R. Martin
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
Ayn Rand
For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.
John Fowles
Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us…
Wilkie Collins
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.
Ayn Rand
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
Ayn Rand
i wish you could understand me, but of course it is not the way of this world that we are ever completely understood.
Murasaki Shikibu
If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relative to do the business.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?
Émile Zola
The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.
Jean Lorrain
English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.
Tomson Highway
Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!"How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.
Murasaki Shikibu
Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.
Jasper Fforde
I was examining the perfumed, coloured candles guaranteed to bring good fortune with continued use when a lovely mocha-skinned girl came in from the back room and stood behind the counter. She wore a white smock over her dress and looked about nineteen or twenty. Her wavy, shoulder-length hair was the colour of polished mahogany. A number of thin, silver hoops jingled on her fine-boned wrist. "May I help you?" she asked. Just beneath her carefully modulated diction lingered the melodic calypso lilt of the Caribbean.
William Hjortsberg
The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
Wilkie Collins
You’re young, and like anything new. It’s change you want. I’m middle-aged, and there’s nothing staler to me than change. Constant comfort and little luxuries as regular as the clock are fresher than change.
John Davidson
A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.
Núria Añó
It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.
John Hersey
Ad we interviewing each other?Something like that.What position am I applying for?Best friend.I thought I already had the job.Don't be so sure, you arrogant son of a bitch.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
Margaret Drabble
Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."]
Guy de Maupassant
Get black on white.
Guy de Maupassant
He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.
Philippa Gregory
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W Somerset Maugham
How can you still count yourself a knight, when you have forsaken every vow you ever swore?" Jaime reached for the flagon to refill his cup. "So many vows...they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other.
George R.R. Martin