Famous Quotes & Sayings

Muriel Spark

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

His venture sounds like a banana peel awaiting its victim.

Kingsley Amis

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

Kingsley Amis

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

Kingsley Amis

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

Charles Dickens

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

Joanna Trollope

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

Jonathan Coe

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.

Rumer Godden

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.

Jean Rhys

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.

Jonathan Coe

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.

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

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

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

Samuel Richardson

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

Samuel Richardson

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

Samuel Richardson

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

Joanna Trollope

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

J. R. R. Tolkien

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

Simon Raven

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

Jonathan Coe

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.

Mark Haddon

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

Anthony Burgess

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

Vita Sackville-West

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

Wilkie Collins

Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.

Wilfrid Sheed

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

Angela Carter

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

Angela Carter

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

Angela Carter

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.

Margaret Drabble

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