Quotes by Writers - Page 54

How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.
Hilary Mantel
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
Hilary Mantel
Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.
John Cleese
I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.
Hilary Mantel
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.
Hilary Mantel
Sapphires for my bride-to-be and a severed head for the king my brother," said Duke Richard cheerfully. "As St Paul pointed out, gifts may vary but the spirit is the same. In the present instance, a spirit of goodwill.
Reay Tannahill
What, did you think," she asked, laughing as he struggled up the bank, "that I, a Gaulish maiden, could not swim?" "I did not think anything about it," Malchus said; "I saw you pushed in and followed without thinking at all." Although they imperfectly understood each other's words the meaning was clear; the girl put her hand on his shoulder and looked frankly up in his face. "I thank you," she said, "just the same as if you had saved my life. You meant to do so, and it was very good of you, a great chief of this army, to hazard your life for a Gaulish maiden. Clotilde will never forget.
G.A. Henty
The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
Hilary Mantel
Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.
Hermann Rauschning
The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Hilary Mantel
Truth, meanwhile, was a weaponthat even a damaged fist could still grasp and wield. It was a remarkably versatile commodity; it could be traded, or help serve an end, or produce aprofit.
Mark Allen Smith
You never knew when God would send you just what you needed, sometimes even when you didn't realize you were missing anything in the first place. You just had to keep your eyes-and mind-open to the possibilities.
Mia Ross
It’s because we help out when they’re in trouble that we can count on them to come running when we need it.-Shikamaru Nara
Masashi Kishimoto
I once laughed at the vanity of women of thirty or forty who whitened their ruddy old skin with lead, but now I know such salves are not disguises for old crones who wish to catch a young husband. Instead they are only a mask we wear so that we can, for a little while, still recognize ourselves.
Rebecca Johns
Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.
Eva Figes
There isn't a thing I can't do now that I didn't do when I was twenty-one...which gives you an idea of how pathetic I was when I was twenty-one. (That's a lie, but I might as well tell you something right here at the beginning of the book. Anytime I can get a laugh I'm not going to let the truth interfere with it.)
George Burns
It's not cold in here, you're just dying.
Sarah Silverman
The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.
Lord Dunsany
As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel "forty" the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty
Liane Moriarty
our dispassionate acceptance of attrition...[can] be matched by a full use of everything that has ever happened in all the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind from his body.
M.F.K. Fisher
She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind.
M.F.K. Fisher
Why is it amazing that I don’t act my age? Why should I act my age? Or more to the point, how is someone my age supposed to act? Old age is part fact, part state of mind, part luck, and wholly something best left for other people to ponder, not you or me. Why waste your time? I don’t.
Dick Van Dyke
..why sit on the sidelines of life at any age?
Dick Van Dyke
[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
Donald Hall
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty?
Aldous Huxley
You fellows are amazing,' the sweaty cook roared over the stoves. 'Everything happens to you only. Each time you come here, you have a new adventure story to entertain us
Rohinton Mistry
Come on up, boys-I'm dead.
Dylan Thomas
When I say to the Moment flying;'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!'Then bind me in thy bonds undying,And my final ruin I will bear!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Melville to Hawthorne: "In your stories, you seem to understand that the dramatic moments come not when a character must choose between right and wrong buy when he must choose between two wrongs.
Mark Beauregard
Modesty seldom resides in a breast that is not enriched with nobler virtues.
Oliver Goldsmith
I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.
Frank Capra
There are no human gods here, just hoods who think they are.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Were one to call your stupid ism good, well then, one would either be equally idiotic, or a fool, or no good.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character.
Oliver Markus
There comes a time. The pain of existence transcends the fear of change. There comes a time.
Moshe Kasher
When you push someone's head under water for 5 minutes, they will drown. It doesn't matter if the person is a sinner or a saint. It's just a natural process. If their head is under water, the lack of oxygen will make them drown. That rule applies to everyone, good or bad, equally. It doesn't matter if the drowning person has strong moral fiber.And it doesn't matter if you're a good or a bad person, once you become addicted to drugs. What happens next is inevitable. It's a natural process that happens in everyone's brain, once the drugs take over. So don't ever fool yourself into thinking that only weak or bad people get addicted.
Oliver Markus
Being mad at a drug addict for doing what drug addicts do, is like being mad at a shark for doing what sharks do, or being mad at a cockroach for doing what cockroaches do.
Oliver Markus
Quit while you’re ahead.All the best gamblers do.
Baltasar Gracián Y Morales
He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.Our government's got a war on drugs....But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of time from when he was sixteen until he was forty. When he was forty-one, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.Other drunks have seen pink elephants.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Monetary policy does not work like a scalpel but more like a sledgehammer.
Liaquat Ahamed
When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn't occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.
Rex Stout
Some people have to leave your life because their very presence prevents, perverts & distorts your purpose. Don't be afraid to let go.
Renita Bryant
They embraced in parting. There were tears in the merchant’s eyes:“I do not like parting.”“Life consists of partings,” said Arseny. “But you can rejoice more fully in companionship when you remember that.”“But I would (the merchant Vladislav blew his nose) gather up all the good people I’ve met and never let them go.”“I think then they would quickly become mean,” smiled Ambrogio. (p. 238)
Evgenij Vodolazkin
The best skill at cards is knowing when to discard.
Baltasar Gracián
Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence.
Whittaker Chambers
I have a very hard time getting to rage. I always assume that maybe I've done something wrong and then forgotten about it.
Merrill Markoe
It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.
Aleksandar Hemon
I've spent all the years since full of guilt and misery, even though I didn't remember it. I've let it run my thoughts, my plans, my whole life. But the experience doesn't own me. I own it. What I do with it is up to me, just like what Molly does with her death magic is up to her.
Faith Hunter
It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.
S.J. Parris
The grandeur of a profession is...above all, uniting men: there is only one true luxury, that of human relationships.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Voltaire
Where there is unity, there is always victory
Publilius Syrus
My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
Karl Kraus
Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus)
Martijn Benders
Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.
Common
He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".
Enrique Vila-Matas
Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.
Lorraine Hansberry
A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.
Agona Apell