Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, and create a monster they call Destiny.
[On John Cleese:] He sometimes seems to swat at his own thoughts as if they were bees.
I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.
If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.
Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
If it means something, take it to heart. If it means nothing, it's nothing. Let it go.
Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.
He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.
Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.
When we refuse to accept our limitations, Nature, who is a stern realist, pays us out.
Cast between the extremes of happiness and misfortune, uncertainty is a cruel torment.
Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.
Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.
Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.
What I mean and what I say is two different things," the BFG announced rather grandly.
'Dexter' is a very well-oiled machine; it's just a great show and great to be part of.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.
Some countries you love. Some countries you hate. Canada is a country you worry about.
Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words.
I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.
In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.
When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.
Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.
We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
God would not give us the same talent if what were right for men were wrong for women.
A Superwoman isn't a woman who can do anything, but a woman who avoids doing too much.
She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
Girls are weird, and I don't mean that offensively. I just can't put it any other way.
I have never connected with 'Gone With the Wind.' 'Lawrence of Arabia' leaves me cold.
A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.
My cream and black Aga. It is the heart of the house, and people congregate around it.
Imagine it. Use all your strength and imagine it exactly. And it will happen that way.
When you finally figure out what you really want, everything else pales in comparison.
There are two words that send romance authors into spasms of rapture: 'Downton Abbey.'
Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond.
Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.
Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
Humour is God's special gift to humanity. Handy, because it turns out to be necessary.
The tactics...no, amateurs discuss tactics,.... Professional soldiers study logistics.
My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.
Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
There's no need to imagine that you're a wondrous beauty, because that's what you are.