Quotes by Novelists - Page 10

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
Cultivated men and women who do not skim the cream of life and are attached to the duties yet escape the harsher blows make acute and balanced observers.
George Meredith
The secret of success is constancy of purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
To all to each a fair good night And pleasing dreams and slumbers light.
Walter Scott
The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.
Frank Miller
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
Thank God ever morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done whether you like it or not.
Charles Kingsley
To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.
Ayn Rand
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana
There is something haunting in the light of the moon it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul and something of its inconceivable mystery.
Joseph Conrad
After a debauch of thundershower the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled.
George Moore
He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.
Stephen Vincent Benét
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept Remembering thee.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
It is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings it is the soft luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
Ouida
I take it that what all men are really after is some form of perhaps only some formula of peace.
Joseph Conrad
Every true man sir who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants lives so as to give a meaning and a value to his own life.
Luigi Pirandello
Talent isn't enough. You need motivation-and persistence too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you're young plain old poverty can be enough along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have to have that feeling of "I'll show them." If you don't have it don't become a writer.
Leon Uris
I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it.
James Dickey
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.
Jean Giraudoux
The weariest night the longest day sooner or later must perforce come to an end.
Baroness Orczy
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
Thornton Wilder
How like a queen comes forth the lonely Moon From the slow opening curtains of the clouds Walking in beauty to her midnight throne!
George Croly
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.
Louis Kronenberger
Money is like a sixth sense and you can't make use of the other five without it.
W Somerset Maugham
Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.
Henry Fielding
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Honoré de Balzac
The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies.
J. A. Froude
Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.
Benjamin Disraeli
I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.
Françoise Sagan
No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.
Anthony Trollope
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
W Somerset Maugham
We must always have old memories and young hopes.
Arsene Houssaye
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain therefore to treat them as if they were equal.
J. A. Froude
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
Joseph Conrad
There's a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.
C. Day Lewis
Departure should be sudden.
Benjamin Disraeli
A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.
Thomas Mann
Every woman should marry - and no man.
Benjamin Disraeli
A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
Honoré de Balzac
It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.
Benjamin Disraeli
No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.
Benjamin Disraeli
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
Honoré de Balzac
His designs were strictly honourable as the phrase is: that is to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.
Henry Fielding
Man's the bad child of the universe.
James Oppenheim
Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
Benjamin Disraeli
Luck is what a capricious man believes in.
Benjamin Disraeli
In the queer mess of human destiny the determining factor is luck.
William E. Woodward
But there's nothing half so sweet in life As love's young dream.
George Moore
And love is loveliest when embalm'd in tears.
Walter Scott
Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.
Rémy de Gourmont
We are all born for love ... It is the principle of existence and its only end.
Benjamin Disraeli
No love no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.
François Mauriac
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Thomas Mann
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Joseph Conrad
London is a roost for every bird.
Benjamin Disraeli
A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.
George Moore
Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity and that he acknowledges the end.
George Meredith
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder