Quotes by Novelists - Page 75

Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
W Somerset Maugham
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying it
Bernard Malamud
The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.
Henry Green
At the street corner, a one-storey house built of freestone, but repulsively decrepit and filthy, seemed to command the entrance, like a gaol. And here, indeed, lived La Méchain, like a vigilant proprietess, ever on the watch, exploiting in person her little population of starving tenants.
Émile Zola
The border between the State of Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip had always reminded him of the line between Tijuana and greater San Diego. There, too, ragged men the color of earth waited with the mystical patience of the very poor on the pleasure of crisply uniformed, well-nourished officials. Some months before, Lucas had come down for the dawn shape-up at the checkpoint, and he had not forgotten the drawn faces in the half-light, the terrible smiles of the weak, straining to make themselves agreeable to the strong.
Robert Stone
There were office-worn gents with yellow faces, bent backs, and one shoulder set slightly higher than the other from spending hours hunched over desks. And their sad, anxious faces spoke volumes about their domestic troubles, never-ending money worries, and all those old hopes which had been dashed for good; for they all belonged to the army of poor threadbare drudges who just about make ends meet in some dismal plasterboard house with a flowerbed for a garden in the rubbish-and-slag-heap belt on the outskirts of Paris.
Guy de Maupassant
You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.
Nevil Shute
The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.
Anthony Trollope
Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.
Anthony Powell
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.
W Somerset Maugham
Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? So you burn cars, ecause when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.
Muriel Barbery
Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money.
W Somerset Maugham
For avarice begins where poverty ends.
Honoré de Balzac
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.
John Berger
If you say I hide things because I'm shy, that can't be right. I've finally realized it's for a different reason-- that I don't want to see the darkness that lies in my heart
Natsuo Kirino
All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.And now, in this darkness, I fear nothing. If you were to leave me here, I would feel nothing. I would walk as I am walking now. As a man, you can't know what I mean by what I say.You can't know a woman's vulnerability. You can't know the sense of power that belongs to me now.
Anne Rice
The recognition of his carelessness filled Mr. Lecky with fear and anger. In the dusk his eerie heart could anticipate the hours of terror which he had laid up for himself. Sounds, real or imaginary, the silences and secrets of the night, the working of his own mind, skilled in cruel illusion and rich in evil fancy, would find him without recourse.
James Gould Cozzens
One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.
Morris West
I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don’t bother to sell it to another human being. It’s bad business to even consider such a thing.
Anne Rice
Darkness had been essentially banished from the Earth. It had become a choice.
Anne Rice
It is strange how loud little sounds become when you are in the dark and doing something wrong.
Richard Llewellyn
Ann put the oven to heat. She washed the lamb under the tap, turning it around to clean the entire leg. Then it was dried with a paper towel, stretched out on the cutting board to be hammered flat, and rubbed with salt and rosemary she took from the kitchen window. She waited for the oven to reach two hundred. The cleaned scent of the meat and the clatter of the water in the skink, the branches of rosemary, the dogs finding each other’s ears in the evening, the children being called indoors, servants standing on the road for the Indian bus, and the rising heat of the oven against the remaining heat of the day made her aware of her own happiness. This happiness was like the sea wind when the temperature of the water and the land reversed and everything was free in new darkness.
Imraan Coovadia
I am the sword in the darkness.
George R.R. Martin
If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.
John Fowles
People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.The black and the black and the black.
John Fowles
A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.
Chinua Achebe
One thing—one thing exceeds the eternity of the star, he cries, and that is the dark which surrounds it.
William H. Gass
Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative.("Out Of The Deep")
Walter de la Mare
His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.
Joseph Conrad
And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.
Joseph Conrad
Today, Aaron decided, he would begin to grieve in earnest. He would walk the lonely beach, mocked by gulls, uncaring, his every step a stately rebuke to the malign forces that had blighted his fate. His was the tragedy of a man who couldn't have his own way, and he intended to make known his anguish in the solemn solitude that only a stretch of sand, a suspiring sea, and a beetling cliff could provide.
Joseph Caldwell
Are you certain they never cut your member off?" Tormund gave a shrug, as if to say he would never understand such madness. "Well, you are a free man now, but if you will have the girl, best find yourself a she-bear. If a man does not use his member it grows smaller and smaller, until one day he wants to piss and cannot find it.
George R.R. Martin
I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason.
Wilkie Collins
He would not object, he said, to accepting a post as a librarian. But as Cecilia was unable to imagine that her father or her brother would feel any marked degree of satisfaction in giving her in marriage to a librarian, this very handsome concession on Mr Fawnhope's part merely added to her despondency.
Georgette Heyer
His attention caught, her companion raised his eyes from the book which lay open beside him on the table and directed them upon her in a look of aloof enquiry. 'What's that? Did you say something to me, Venetia?''Yes, love,' responded his sister cheerfully, 'but it wasn't of the least consequence, and in any event I answered for you. You would be astonished, I daresay, if you knew what interesting conversations I enjoy with myself.
Georgette Heyer
…When you’ve know me longer, you’ll learn that I mean everything I say.”“Even the lies?”“Especially the lies. Lord Petyr…
George R.R. Martin
He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.
Hilary Mantel
Pray, what's the nature of his trouble?" Prudence asked solicitously."Oh, cursed bad news, my boy. That old aunt of his from whom he has expectations has rallied, and they say she'll last another ten years. Poor old Devereux, y'know! Must try and raise his spirits.
Georgette Heyer
But where is my son? Where is the beautiful Miss Merriot?
Georgette Heyer
The photographer was lost for riposte, obvious though it should have been; instead he turned to run. At least his mind did. In fact, his mind had already scooted down the Broad Walk and was clambering over the railings at the end, whereas his body had remained rooted to the spot. With some effort he looked down at his feet as if to reprimand them. They refused to take notice.
James Herbert
A mere wilderness, as you see, even now in December; but in summer a complete nursery of briers, a forest of thistles, a plantation of nettles, without any live stock but goats, that have eaten up all the bark of the trees. Here you see is the pedestal of a statue, with only half a leg and four toes remaining: there were many here once. When I was a boy, I used to sit every day on the shoulders of Hercules: what became of him I have never been able to ascertain. Neptune has been lying these seven years in the dust-hole; Atlas had his head knocked off to fit him for propping a shed; and only the day before yesterday we fished Bacchus out of the horse-pond.
Thomas Love Peacock
Raven: The Honourable Mr Listless is gone. He declared that, what with family quarrels in the morning, and ghosts at night, he could get neither sleep nor peace; and that the agitation was too much for his nerves: though Mr Glowry assured him that the ghost was only poor Crow walking in his sleep, and that the shroud and bloody turban were a sheet and a red nightcap.
Thomas Love Peacock
Raven: The Reverend Mr Larynx has been called off on duty, to marry or bury (I don't know which) some unfortunate person or persons, at Claydyke:...
Thomas Love Peacock
For instance, a fireman is a brave fellow! He fears nothing, least ofall fire! Well, the fireman in question, who had gone to make a roundof inspection in the cellars and who, it seems, had ventured a littlefarther than usual, suddenly reappeared on the stage, pale, scared,trembling, with his eyes starting out of his head, and practicallyfainted in the arms of the proud mother of little Jammes.[1] And why?Because he had seen coming toward him, AT THE LEVEL OF HIS HEAD, BUTWITHOUT A BODY ATTACHED TO IT, A HEAD OF FIRE! And, as I said, afireman is not afraid of fire.The fireman's name was Pampin.
Gaston Leroux
The only person who worries about my mother is God, and that's only because she wants His job.
Sue Civil-Brown
I only need half my wits to be a match for you.
George R.R. Martin
Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occasional hole in the copy was filled with a ghoulish smudge - local block-making had clearly indicated that somewhere a poker-work fanatic had gone quietly out of his mind. In this way the Central Balkan Herald was made up every morning and then delivered to the composition room where the chain-gang quickly reduced it to gibberish. MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC. WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR PRINCESS. QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICE MEN. MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE. BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT.
Lawrence Durrell
Now, how do you suppose this queen will react when you turn up with your begging bowl in hand and say, 'Good morrow to you, Auntie. I am your nephew, Aegon, returned from the dead. I've been hiding on a poleboat all my life, but now I've washed the blue dye from my hair and I'd like a dragon, please...and oh, did I mention, my claim to the Iron Throne is stronger than your own?
George R.R. Martin
There are worse things than eating the dead, my dear fellow. Far worse things. There is, for instance, making a huge profit out of their funeral, which is the normal custom in the civilized world.
Leonard Wibberley
World opinion, though sharply divided on nuclear tests and the risk of atmospheric pollution, could congratulate itself on being united in its opposition to cannibalism. No country in the world was prepared to support the custom of eating the dead, though the right of governments to kill people, individually or by hundreds of thousands, was not questioned for a moment.
Leonard Wibberley
Americans can't stand any stranger looking them in the face. They take it as an insult. It's something they don't forgive. And every American carries a gun. If they catch you, a stranger, looking them in the face, they will shoot.
Okey Ndibe
Demane: "Gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most sapiens—even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica—haven’t yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism.”"Do doubt," Comalo nodded mellowly. "No doubt. I'd always maybe thought it was something like that.
Kai Ashante Wilson
The surgeon tells me that you're a sorcerer," Pym said. "Is that so?"Jaki looked to the captain with the glare of the masts in his eyes. "Yes."Pym weighed this disclosure. "You speak with the dead?""Yes."The captain's eyes screwed up intently. "What do they say to you?""They don't talk back."Pym and Mister Blackheart laughed in unison...The captain said, "Mister Blackheart wants to know what kind of sorcerer you are."Jaki pondered a response and finally said, "I was learning to catch souls before my teacher was killed.""Souls, eh? And what do you do with them after you catch them?""I put them back in their bodies.""Ah, then you're telling us you're a surgeon.
A.A. Attanasio
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
Anthony Powell
He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.
Gabriel García Márquez
In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didn't want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasn't interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
And prayer? How could you pray to a God you wanted to hit?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The guys can't take their eyes off Colleen... one of them... probably sees her just like I do, she's the gatekeeper to another world.
Ron Koertge