Novelist Quotes

A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Fear is the mother of foresight.

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

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

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

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.