English Novelist Quotations | Page 2

No, I spend my money on huge phone bills.

They were written in the early '90s when I was strapped for cash.

The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.

If net neutrality goes away, it will fundamentally change everything about the Internet.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

I'm a third done into a new book but sorry - I have a superstition about talking about it!

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

How can I go on with this? Please God, let me win a football pool.

I don't know, I don't really have a view about what my contemporaries are doing, except that I enjoy individual writers and so on.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting.

All TV can do is capture the spirit of a book because the medium is so utterly different. But I'm very grateful for the readers that Masterpiece Theatre has undoubtedly brought me.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

No one is useless in the world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.

Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.

Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.

Credit is a system whereby a person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness.

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honour as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

I can sympathise with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.

You was a good man, and did good things.