Famous Quotes & Sayings

Anthony Burgess

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

Margaret Drabble

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

Kingsley Amis

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

Kingsley Amis

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

Kingsley Amis

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

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.

John Mortimer

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

The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves.

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

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

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 man may keep a woman, but not his estate.

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.

Thomas Hardy

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

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.

Vita Sackville-West

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

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.

Charles Dickens

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

J. R. R. Tolkien

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

His venture sounds like a banana peel awaiting its victim.

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Jonathan Coe

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

Rose Tremain

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

Joanna Trollope

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.