English Author Quotations

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

If you do not think about your future, you cannot have one.

An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country.

Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England.

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.

An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness.

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

History is the great dust-heap... a pageant and not a philosophy.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone.

The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.

Never think that you're not good enough. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

What's coming will come and we'll just have to meet it when it does.

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

For love that time was not as love is nowadays.

Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.

The existing documentary makers still believe that it is impossible to produce drama material in this State, otherwise they would be doing it, they say.

King Pellinore that time followed the questing beast.

We called him Tortoise because he taught us.

We are not yet at the point where our size, our being the drama industry, is sufficient to support full time professional crews, and that is very very important.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print, but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can hardly accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.

Men are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

It will never be Hollywood, the same way people think it should be. I think it will grow and it will be healthy and it will expand into more than one production house.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

Wine is valued by its price, not its flavour.

It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.

We discovered that there was a great deal of keen interest in America for the kinds of products that we thought could be produced here. Also there was an interest in Britain for Australian material generally.

We probably do not have a large enough industry here to ably support the independent filmmaker to move in and out. Much of the industry is based on full-time jobs here, institutionalised jobs.

But I was thinking of a way To multiply by ten, And always, in the answer, get The question back again.

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

We're under the Arts Council under the Minister for the Arts. The Minister for the Arts and the Minister for Industrial Development have great difficulty in agreeing over who should fund what in terms of film.

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything.

They are best dressed, whose dress no one observes.

We are getting more and more not only the trained but also internationally well-experienced people coming here. So it's all adding up.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Never trust any complicated cocktail that remainds perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.

I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves.

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

From all the ages my soul desired to take that soul-life which had flowed through them as the sunbeams had continually found an earth.

He has a brilliant mind until he makes it up.

There is no good or evil: only power and those too weak to seak it.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Long ago, when moose roamed in the forest at the mountain of the Two Rivers, otters had followed eels migrating from ponds and swamps to the seas.

'Tis the last rose of summer Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone.

There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony; that is, of course, provided that the aspirant declines the slow course of honest work.

There are Aboriginal groups up north and in the west, northwest of WA, that do not have television, they do not have cinemas, but they do have videos.

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child and to render myself worthy to join him. Soon my weary pilgrimage will begin.

The moose are gone, and their bones lie under the sand in the soft coal which was the forest by the estuary, thousands of years ago.

This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation.

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our friends, but just as much to stand up to our enemies.

The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those who feel.

Noting that Huckleberry Finn was originally both valued and reviled because it shows the reader that the accepted moral code and social hierarchy is not always correct.

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'

I am very much in favour of video because the quality of production of video is now so good. It is a different experience to sitting in a cinema.

For the first time in one place in the west, there were important people from all the other states, all aspects of the film world.

An Ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.