Quotes by Novelists - Page 35

It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.
Louis Aragón
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
I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.
Donald Windham
I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.
W Somerset Maugham
Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.
Arnold Bennett
There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.
Wallace Stegner
Descending the endless stairs for the sixth time, Mr. Lecky thought of all the goods those closed doors hid. Fantastic was the discouragement it caused him. Aware of such variety and great quantity, Mr. Lecky saw the danger of forgetting or never even imagining things which, discovered, he would want. Everlastingly midway between two equal errors, to which could he cleave? To have time for everything, one must make haste. To gain access to everything, one must be patient.Moreover, hasty, or patient as Job, with what great labor would Mr. Lecky carry up on his back all he got! Making, as he was every moment, the climb back longer, giving, as he did with each step down, consent to toil more and more severe, he could anticipate vaguely and abhor another possibility. Curious and insubstantial as his fearing not to find what he could not think of, was his resentment of a perhaps coming time when he might, in revolt against the inanity of exertion, live meanly and miserably, with no object but somehow to make what was already at hand suffice for him. Against this insidious ill chance there exists no defense, since so often what today is detested will appear tomorrow - though surely still detestable - good and wise.
James Gould Cozzens
The avarice, the hunger for materialistic possessions and the dependency upon alcohol had gradually become stronger and stronger. And now, it was the sum total of what she was.
Sue Fortin
Take taking from those that give & nobody anywhere will need any more such gifts.
Kenneth Patchen
Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
James K. Morrow
The basic dynamics of conversion are summed up for me in the words LEAVE-ARRIVE, END-BEGIN, SHED-EMERGE. These are the tensions of conversion and spiritual awakening.
Sue Monk Kidd
He was still experimenting with kissing girls even though he said he'd rather be kissing boys. That's exactly what he said. I didn't know exactly what to think about that, but Dante was going to be Dante and if I was going to be his friend, I would just have to learn to be okay with it.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.
Honoré de Balzac
I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me.
Sue Monk Kidd
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .
Luc Berimont
Three good men dead, to save a hedge knight's foot.
George R.R. Martin
He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead.
Edmund White
he knew in his body, even if he hadn’t yet put it together in his mind, that in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.
Yaa Gyasi
as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.
Anne Rice
The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.
John Fowles
Do you recall Fred Merriville?”She stared at him. “Fred Merriville? Pray, what has he to say to anything?”“The poor fellow has nothing to say: he’s dead, alas!
Georgette Heyer
And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Fort somehow turned the symbol of nerdiness into a visual aphrodisiac—Spanish fly in the form of solid black frames.
Shirin Dubbin
It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment.
Émile Gaboriau
The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want.
W Somerset Maugham
You're the hunter, the warrior. You're stronger than anyone else here, that's your tragedy.
Anne Rice
We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.
George R.R. Martin
Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had love him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death. (Love in the Time of Cholera)
Gabriel García Márquez
The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history - especially a tragic history - uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing - but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure.
Jean Lorrain
I repeat here what you will find in my first chapter, that the only thing that signifies to you in a book is what it means to you, and if your opinion is at variance with that of everyone else in the world it is of no consequence. Your opinion is valid for you. In matters of art people, especially, I think, in America, are apt to accept willingly from professors and critics a tyranny which in matters of government they would rebel against. But in these questions there is no right and wrong. The relation between the reader and his book is as free and intimate as that between the mystic and his God. Of all forms of snobbishness the literary is perhaps the most detestable, and there is no excuse for the fool who despises his fellow-man because he does not share his opinion of the value of a certain book. Pretence in literary appreciation is odious, and no one should be ashamed if a book that the best critics think highly of means nothing to him. On the other hand it is better not to speak ill of such books if you have not read them.
W Somerset Maugham
And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.
Ben Lerner
To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)
Steven Heighton
[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires.
Théophile Gautier
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
W Somerset Maugham
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
Benjamin Disraeli
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
Gustave Flaubert
Question and AnswerDurban, Birmingham,Cape Town, Alabama,Johannesburg, Watts,The earth aroundStruggling, fighting,Dying--for what?A world to gain.Groping, hoping,Waiting--for what?A world to gain.Dreams kicked asunder,Why not go under?There's a world to gain.But suppose I don't want it,Why take it?To remake it.
Langston Hughes
... answered his knock with a smile, a short one forced through because she was at heart a warm person, not given to the dark mood swings which now plagued her.
John Grisham
You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men an women upon the earth
Anthony Trollope
I feel that there has to be a purpose to what we do. If there was no hope at all, we should just sleep or drink and wait for death. But we don’t want to do that. And why? I think something tells us that we should struggle. We don’t really know why we should struggle, but we do, because we think it’s better than sitting down and waiting for calamity.
Chinua Achebe
And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.
Arnold Bennett
I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.
Sue Monk Kidd
Oh my eye Betty Martin! Aren't I glad it isn't me that's going to school! It looks just like a prison.
Henry Handel Richardson
... And what am I to do?""Well, that depends. Do you like the girl?""Like her? I don't know. How do you know if...?""It's very simple. Do you look at her furtively and feel like biting her?""Biting her?""On her backside, for example.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl's eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
He liked the girls, liked to hold them around the waist, felt like a man when he did. But as for talking with them, no, no! Then he felt as though he were dealing with another species of human being, in some cases a higher one, in others a lower. He secretly admired the weak, pale, little girl and had picked her to be his wife. That was still the only way he could think of a woman - as a wife. He danced in a very chaste and proper manner, but he heard awful stories about his pals, stories he didn't understand until later. They could dance the waltz backwards around the room in a very indecent way, and they told naughty stories about the girls.
August Strindberg
To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.
Anne Rice
We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.
William H. Gass
The Universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers."Stanley Kunitz
Shirley A. Moore
It is a miracle if we can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do... Lemony Snicket, The Lump of Coal
Shirley A. Moore
1225International big business has made revolutions before now to safeguard its interests. At one time it made them … in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Now, with Socialism to fight, it makes them in the name of Law and Order and Sound Finance. Assassination? If an assassination is going to be good for business, then there will be an assassination.
Eric Ambler
Strike said "Huh" again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.
Richard Price
If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.
Edward St. Aubyn
Betrayal is beautiful.
Jean Genet
Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next.
George R.R. Martin
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
Jean Rhys
Shattered legs may heal in time, but some betrayals fester and poison the soul.
George R.R. Martin