English Novelist Quotations

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.

You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.

It's just six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows.

Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.

One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.

The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible enough to give none.

I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.

The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is, compensates for the misery of being it.

I cannot sleep - great joy is as restless as great sorrow.

Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait.

Well may your heart believe the truths I tell; 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.

When I got a telly we had no aerial, but I discovered that if I or one of the children stood by it you could get a picture. So I had to make a statue that could stand by the telly.

Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.

Time is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary.

The joys we expect are not so bright, nor the troubles so dark as we fancy they will be.

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves.

There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

We always think every other man's job is easier than our own. The better he does it, the easier it looks.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.

Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

In the bosom of her respectable family resided Camilla.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion.

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?

If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.

No wonder people are so horrible when they start life as children.

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported with the later.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

Having leveled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.

I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.

I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

When I'm not thanked at all, I'm thanked enough, I've done my duty, and I've done no more.

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

One fool at least in every married couple.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

The world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.

Vast is the field of Science. The more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

A husband's mother and his wife had generally better be visitors than inmates.

A man may keep a woman, but not his estate.

Those who will bear much, shall have much to bear.

There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.

Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.

So it was primarily a desire to write about that period in one's life rather than that period in history or in British culture or whatever.

Money buts many things... The best of which is freedom.

No brilliance is required in law, just common sense and relatively clean fingernails.

I don't always set stories in villages, more often in towns. But always in smallish communities because the characters' actions are more visible there, and the dramatic tension is heightened.

I am told that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both yes and no.

His venture sounds like a banana peel awaiting its victim.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! -- what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

I'm shy of comparisons to Dickens because he's one of the absolute greats and it's silly to compare a contemporary novelist with someone.

Two things: a lifelong fascination dating from reading fairy stories as a child with stepmothers, why are they always supposed to be "wicked"?

But, on the other hand, the occasional and precarious dripping of coppers has by no means a genial effect.

You can't be too old to be a writer, but you can definitely be too young!

So no, I'm pleased if it's been influential for many readers, but at the time I didn't even know that it was going to have any readers.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

Quantity in food is more to be regarded than quality. A full meal is a great enemy both to study and industry.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Any clod can have the facts; having opinions is an art.

Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.

A woman asking ''Am I good? Am I satisfied?'' is extremely selfish. The less women fuss about themselves, the less they talk to other women, the more they try to please their husbands, the happier the marriage is going to be.

A woman should say: ''Have I made him happy? Is he satisfied? Does he love me more than he loved me before? Is he likely to go to bed with another woman?'' If he does, then it's the wife's fault because she is not trying to make him happy.

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

Also I had financial worries because it took four years to write and we were living off my wife's income all that time, which wasn't very great.

As savage as a bear with a sore head.

It is quite extraordinary how very various are the opinions entertained on this point, and, before sifting them, one must be careful in the first place to eliminate from our inquiry the cases of that considerable class of persons who pinch themselves.

It's not so much hearth as family life which is where we all, I'm sure, learn (or fail to learn!) all our life skills for the future.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written. She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up.

It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.