Louis de Bernieres Quotations

In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.

When you have children it completely shifts your focus; they become the most passionate love of your life.

The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry.

Family law is institutionally anti-male. I've been lobbying MPs, and I'm not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality.

Like many men, I am not ashamed to admit that my principal joys are domestic. I love cooking, and I love looking after my children. Indeed, the times that I have with them are the only ones when I feel unconditionally happy.

So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.

People taking photographs of their meals are not critics; they are from the United States.

An adversarial family law system raises the stakes unnecessarily high, exacerbates the antagonism of the couples concerned, and is directly responsible for making it impossible for couples who would otherwise have reconciled to do so.

Setting up a community and seeing what happens to it when the megalomaniacs get busy: that's my main preoccupation.

The De Bernieres were very military. I broke the military tradition but I was terribly proud of my father being a soldier.

It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about. We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.

The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.

It's stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone.

God is an oppressor, He is incapable of human sympathy; behind a smiling face He hides an evil heart.

Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.

The trouble with fulfilling your ambitions is you think you will be transformed into some sort of archangel and you're not. You still have to wash your socks.

What keeps me going is my children.

Symmetry is for God, not for us.

History is the propaganda of the victors.

Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.

Your lips are like sugar And your cheeks an apple Your breasts are paradise And your body a lily. O, to kiss the sugar To bite the apple To reveal paradise And open the lily.

Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.

I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it's the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish...well, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that's my point.

The garden where you sit Has never a need of flowers, For you are the blossoms And only a fool or the blind Would fail to know it

He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.

When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.

Money has no religion except itself.

[She] knew that it was not precisely a body that one loved. One loved the man who shone out through the eyes and used its mouth to smile and speak.

Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

Love delayed is lust augmented.

No man is a man until he has been a soldier.

Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?

In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.

Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.

Love is not breathlessness; It is not excitement; It is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love”, which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

...but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.

Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.

We have roots that grow towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossom has fallen from our branches we find that we are one tree and not two.

Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.