Quotes by Novelists - Page 4

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
Joseph Conrad
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.
Gabriel García Márquez
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present.
George Santayana
Pride avarice and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.
Joseph Conrad
The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.
Thornton Wilder
Nothing in life is more remarkable than the unnecessary anxiety which we endure and generally create ourselves.
Benjamin Disraeli
Upper classes are a nation's past the middle-class is its future.
Ayn Rand
We might define an eccentric as a man who is law unto himself and a crank as one who having determined what the law is insists on laying it down to others.
Louis Kronenberger
I forgot they were talking about me. They sound so wonderfully convincing.
Jean Giraudoux
I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion I think it must be gratitude.
Benjamin Disraeli
Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus a carnival a travelling troupe of acrobats storytellers dancers singers jugglers sideshow freaks lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.
Paddy Chayefsky
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
William Morris
I cannot tell how the truth may be I say the tale as 'twas said to me.
Walter Scott
Without tact you can learn nothing.
Benjamin Disraeli
Fame has only the span of the day they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.
Ouida
A woman who is loved always has success.
Vicki Baum
Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.
Vicki Baum
The secret of success is constancy of purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
It never pays to deal with the flyweights of the world. They take far too much pleasure in thwarting you at every turn.
Sue Grafton
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous on the contrary it makes them for the most part humble tolerant and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.
W Somerset Maugham
Have the courage of your desire.
George R. Gissing
The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
Benjamin Disraeli
The secret of success is constancy to purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection fears doubts.... I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
Joseph Conrad
Her blue eyes sought the west afar For lovers love the western star.
Walter Scott
A stranger's eyes see clearest.
Charles Reade
I will sit down now but the time will come when you will hear me.
Benjamin Disraeli
A sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.
Benjamin Disraeli
The hare-brained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.
Benjamin Disraeli
If you your lips would keep from slips Five things observe with care To whom you speak of whom you speak And how and when and where.
W. E. Norris
Speech is the small change of silence.
George Meredith
And so make life death and that vast forever One grand sweet song.
Charles Kingsley
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Carl Sandburg
Whatever people may say the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis the former know how to act the latter become uncouth brutes.
Cesare Pavese
Society my dear is like salt water good to swim in but hard to swallow.
Arthur Stringer
No place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable.
George Moore
To all to each a fair goodnight And pleasing dreams and slumbers light.
Walter Scott
The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Bernard Malamud
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
W Somerset Maugham
While a person does not give up on sex sex does not give up on the person.
Gabriel García Márquez
Felicity felicity ... is quaffed out of a golden cup ... the flavour is with you alone and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
Joseph Conrad
A filly who wants to run will always find a rider.
Jacques Audiberti
Man is not the creature of circumstances circumstances are the creature of man. We are free agents and man is more powerful than matter.
Benjamin Disraeli
Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves or you will never find it.
Bertha von Suttner
I love being single. It's almost like being rich.
Sue Grafton
Every man paddles his own canoe.
Frederick Marryat
Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.
Shirley Hazzard
The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermit-tent gloom.
Margaret Drabble
Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
Louis Kronenberger
I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are the signposts are there waiting for us to translate them.
Gail Godwin
Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature with all its contradictions appetites aversions rages can one hope to understand a little ... oh I admit only a very little ... of what life is about.
Françoise Sagan
No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
Joseph Conrad
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
Thomas Mann
One sees intelligence far more than one hears it. People do not always say transcendental things but if they are capable of saying them it is always visible.
Marie Leneru
It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.
Muriel Spark
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
Ouida
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Arnold Bennett